Effective Dropouts believes in viewing this as an “exploration exploitation” problem, and considering that there are many ways to approach the problem (where university is just one approach), and many things that the exploration-exploitation-tradeoff might be trying to optimize.
As a naive example (not from the official ED curriculum), if I’d suggest you read 100 random articles from Wikipedia, would that count as “getting exposure to a broader set of ideas”? If not, why not? (what’s the thing you’re implicitly trying to optimize for?) Would “read the top 10 posts from [some blogs]” count? Would “do 3 months of work in various different jobs” count? University might be the ideal way for some people to explore options, but I do think most people would benefit from considering at least one other option
Fair questions to ask. I’d hope the quality of information obtained through uni courses is much better than random selection of reading material, as profs who have spent many years studying a subject should know which are the key texts to read, the most important facts to understand and the key arguments on each side of controversial issues. I think a random selection approach would generally yield information low in importance. (Perhaps articles from certain blogs wouldn’t do too badly, but how would you know which blogs to choose and avoid getting sucked into ones that sound plausible but are terrible?) Edit to add: But doing some reading around the internet before deciding whether to embark on a course of further study could perhaps be a good thing to do.
I don’t really see working in different jobs for a few months doing much to broaden thinking in the ways a uni education would—people I know in regular jobs seem to mostly be focussed on getting narrowly defined tasks done and not much on reflective thinking. Though it may be quite complementary as it could highlight things that an academic education wouldn’t (George Orwell’s writings of working in various jobs come to mind—but it seems rare for workers to take on this journalistic mindset). Edit to add: I also think workplaces will tend to have people with more correlated mindsets (e.g. work in an AI lab and most people around you will probably think developing AI is great), which isn’t very good for developing an accurate worldview, whereas at a university I think you’d be more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of views. Though I don’t have a measure for how well this works in practice (and I think people probably do cluster into groups with similar views to a fair extent). Of course, uni profs and students will tend to be correlated in thinking that uni is good ;-)
Of course that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of profs who focus on unimportant info, are poor at explaining, are biased etc. And as I said I think narrow uni courses are less good for getting a broader perspective. Honestly, I’m not sure how good an average uni education is by this measure (including at “top” unis). But finding a good one could be very valuable.
It would be interesting to have a way to test this, but I can’t think of a good objective test of having broad knowledge.
Effective Dropouts believes in viewing this as an “exploration exploitation” problem, and considering that there are many ways to approach the problem (where university is just one approach), and many things that the exploration-exploitation-tradeoff might be trying to optimize.
As a naive example (not from the official ED curriculum), if I’d suggest you read 100 random articles from Wikipedia, would that count as “getting exposure to a broader set of ideas”? If not, why not? (what’s the thing you’re implicitly trying to optimize for?) Would “read the top 10 posts from [some blogs]” count? Would “do 3 months of work in various different jobs” count? University might be the ideal way for some people to explore options, but I do think most people would benefit from considering at least one other option
Fair questions to ask. I’d hope the quality of information obtained through uni courses is much better than random selection of reading material, as profs who have spent many years studying a subject should know which are the key texts to read, the most important facts to understand and the key arguments on each side of controversial issues. I think a random selection approach would generally yield information low in importance. (Perhaps articles from certain blogs wouldn’t do too badly, but how would you know which blogs to choose and avoid getting sucked into ones that sound plausible but are terrible?) Edit to add: But doing some reading around the internet before deciding whether to embark on a course of further study could perhaps be a good thing to do.
I don’t really see working in different jobs for a few months doing much to broaden thinking in the ways a uni education would—people I know in regular jobs seem to mostly be focussed on getting narrowly defined tasks done and not much on reflective thinking. Though it may be quite complementary as it could highlight things that an academic education wouldn’t (George Orwell’s writings of working in various jobs come to mind—but it seems rare for workers to take on this journalistic mindset). Edit to add: I also think workplaces will tend to have people with more correlated mindsets (e.g. work in an AI lab and most people around you will probably think developing AI is great), which isn’t very good for developing an accurate worldview, whereas at a university I think you’d be more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of views. Though I don’t have a measure for how well this works in practice (and I think people probably do cluster into groups with similar views to a fair extent). Of course, uni profs and students will tend to be correlated in thinking that uni is good ;-)
Of course that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of profs who focus on unimportant info, are poor at explaining, are biased etc. And as I said I think narrow uni courses are less good for getting a broader perspective. Honestly, I’m not sure how good an average uni education is by this measure (including at “top” unis). But finding a good one could be very valuable.
It would be interesting to have a way to test this, but I can’t think of a good objective test of having broad knowledge.