first — i do think there’s a qualitative difference between the position “getting an undergrad degree is good” vs “getting the typical undergrad experience is good.” i think the second is in some ways more defensible than the first, but in most ways less so.

For “getting the typical undergrad experience is good”

• This sort of thing is a strong Chesterton fence. People have been having the typical experience of an undergrad for a while (even while that typical experience changes).
• General upkeeping of norms/institutions is good.
• I think that — for a some ppl — their counterfactual is substantially worse. Even if this means college is functionally daycare, I’d rather they be in adult-day-care than otherwise being a drain on society (e.g. crime).
• It presents the option for automatic solutions to a lot of problems:
  • Socializing
    • high density of possible friends, romantic partners, etc
    • you have to go to classes, talk to ppl, etc
  • Exercise
    • usually a free gym that’s at-least functional
    • you gotta walk to class, dining hall, etc
  • Tons of ability to try slightly “weird” stuff you’ve never tried before — clubs, sports, events, greek life, sexual interactions, classes, etc
  • I think a lot of these things get a lot more difficult when you haven’t had the opportunity to experiment w them. A lot of ppl haven’t experimented w much of anything before — college gives them an easy opportunity to do that w minimal friction before doing so becomes gated behind a ridiculous amount of friction. E.g. getting into a new hobby as an adult is a bit odd, in most social settings — but in college, it’s literally as simple as joining that club.
  • Again — while all of these sorts of things are possible outside of college, they become more difficult, outside of the usual norms, etc.

For “getting an undergrad degree is good”:

• This is a strong Chesterton fence. People have been getting undergrad degrees — or similar — for a wihle.
• It’s an extremely legible symbol for a lot of society:
  • Most ppl who get undergrad degrees aren’t getting the sort of undergrad degree that ben or i sees — i think most are from huge state schools, followed by the gigantic tail of no-name schools.
  • For those ppl, and for the jobs they typically seek, my guess is that for demonstrating the necessary things, like “i can listen to & follow directions, navigate general beaurocracies, learn things when needed, talk to people when needed, and am unlikely to be a extremely mentally ill, etc” — an undergrad degree is a pretty good signal.
  • my guess is that a big part of the problem is that, despite this legible signal being good, ppl have indexed on it way too hard (& away from other signals of legibility, like a trade school, or a high school diploma with a high GPA or something).
• there are probably some instances where getting an undergrad degree isn’t good, but those instances are strongly overrepresented to ben & saul, and the base rate is not that. also, it seems like society should give greater affordances to those who can legibly signal the basic functioning ability that college degrees signal, without having a college degree — like a high highschool GPA, or doing well on their previous few jobs.

Self-Determination and Running Your Own Life

My core argument is that self-determination is good, and being part of a corrupt ecosystem that tells you false narratives about it and takes your power from you is bad.

I believe that your goal in the early years of your life should be to get ~$100k in your bank account, and some skills where you can live minimally by yourself.

If you do not have enough money to live without work for 1-2 years, then you will always be beholden to your employment pool, which has many corrupt things going on in it.

Reminder that academia is full of frauds and little to no punishment, as is tech (e.g. crypto), and there is rampant bad behavior in the rest of tech (OpenAI, Uber, more), as is the government (<insert list of corruption scandals with elected officials along with the biggest and baddest bureaucracies you’ve ever seen along with my experience with Berkeley City government>)

It’s crucially important that you can have a life separate to these institutions — that you can choose to go home and stop playing their games.

Academia and its credentialism is another one of these institutions. The credentials typically are meaningless, the vast majority of the signal is that they let you in at all. The literature professors cannot write good books, the philosophy department thinks you should always defect in a one-shot prisoners’ dilemma, the AI department didn’t notice that AIs might literally kill you, the physicists were stuck on string theory for decades, etc. I recall reading a recent Nobel Prizewinner in physics talking about how most of the career after his valuable work (but prior to getting the Nobel Prize) all his grants were getting turned down, and the grant that he did his prizewinning work on he expected would be rejected today.

College itself teaches few lasting skills (cf. Bryan Caplan on The Case Against Education) and lies to you about it. I recall my graduation ceremony were a man in formal robes in a building many hundreds of years old told all of us and our parents how we’d grown from children into adults through the Oxford Education. Well, let me tell you, I got nothing from them, all my personal growth was from visiting the FHI, making friends with Jacob Lagerros, putting on an EAGx when I was 19, going to CFAR, meeting Oli Habryka, and working on LessWrong. College just made me feel guilty, like a failure, and taught me little.

Also if you buy into credentialism most of the places that care about degrees are not healthy places to be. Do you want to work for a consulting firm? Those people always seem lifeless to me and like they pretend to know how to run a business, but the Hanson take is that most of the value is in having prestigious people endorse the drop-dead obvious changes that the org needs. In 2012 he wrote the blogpost Too Much Consulting, here’s an excerpt:

My guess is that most intellectuals underestimate just how dysfunctional most firms are. Firms often have big obvious misallocations of resources, where lots of folks in the firm know about the problems and workable solutions. The main issue is that many highest status folks in the firm resist such changes, as they correctly see that their status will be lowered if they embrace such solutions.

The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide. Coalitions can often successfully block a CEO initiative, and yet not resist the further support of a prestigious outside consultant.

To serve this function, management consulting firms need to have the strongest prestige money can buy. They also need to be able to quickly walk around a firm, hear the different arguments, and judge where the weight of reason lies. And they need to be relatively immune to accusations of bias – that their advice follows from interests, affiliations, or commitments.

I think the most real skill you can pick up at college is programming, and I think you can get this just as well if not better via private tutors and independent study. My college mostly taught me a lot of theoretical bullshit about algorithms and so forth and never caused me to get a github account or build a website. That stuff is better for signaling and passing hiring interviews but you can just go for the throat yourself and prove your worth by building useful products.

(I acknowledge that it is much easier to learn programming for people who are ~2 standard deviations higher IQ than average. I acknowledge this as a weak point in my case but I do want to at least argue strongly that if you have an IQ of 120 or 130 then you should definitely not go to college.)

I think one of the strongest arguments for going to college is access to other smart people (e.g. me meeting Jacob Lagerros). However, you can just show up to college without committing to anything. I have showed up to Stanford and sat in classes. I have gone to the cafeteria. I have entered their empty concerts halls with my guitar and practiced. I have stayed overnight in friends’ dorm rooms. I have gone and participated in / helped out with student groups at different colleges. If you’re looking to get particular value from college, you can get it for free without accepting the dumb package deal of giving up your life and doing crazy pointless classes and being part of a narrative that is false. And all this means is that you won’t work at McKinsey.

(At this point I should say that the primary reason I endorse getting a college degree is for immigration purposes to the US or another country. I think it’s worth setting that aside for now and just arguing on the rest of the merits, e.g. should a US citizen get one.)

I think the primary reason that people go to college is to avoid blame. In the same way that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody ever was considered a failure or embarrassed or got disowned by their parents for choosing to go to college, especially a prestigious one. I think that’s the brunt of the reason, and if you’re going to self-determine and run your own life, you shouldn’t be making the biggest decisions in your life for this lame reason.

In summary,:

1. I think that to live a whole and ethical life you need to not be beholden to corrupt institutions — you need to be able to walk out, and not be committed to their credentialist games. So focus on learning actual skills and making money yourself.
2. Academia and the credentialist system is full of frauds and lies and fake knowledge. The upside here is low.
3. You can just get the good parts of college for free! I have just shown up and gotten them. You’re not being excluded from colleges (because secretly, the stuff just isn’t that valuable, so they don’t protect it).
4. The main reason people do this is to avoid blame for their big life decisions. Do not be a zombie. Do better than this.

Hi! Um, I'm curious, what counts as a clear example of a Chesterton's fence to you? Could you give some examples?

yeah sure, lemme think for a sec

(going to intentionally include some that i endorse breaking, and some that i endorse keeping)

• getting married
• not having sex until after you get married
• caring about the things your peers care about
• trying to have a good relationship with your family
• democracy (in long-standing democratic states)
• autocracy (in long-standing autocratic states)

i could go on?

(it's quite possible i'm using the handle "chesterton's fence" to point at a meaning that's different from the meaning that most ppl use the handle for.)

why wouldn't it be better for everyone to just try to figure it out for themselves and not consider the chesterton's fence aspect when making life decisions? what would go wrong?

• it would cause a lot of ppl to make a decision that a lot of other ppl are also making — my guess is that we'd waste a bunch of thinking-power via redundancy...
• but also, i think to some extent ppl should do the challenging of chestertons fences more. my point isn't "don't challenge chesterton's fences" but rather "chestertons fences should give you reason to pause"

Still want to get a picture of what goes wrong, I don't think you just think it's redundant calculations...?

yep, sure.

...i think also that a lot of people make bad decisions about a lot of things, and that chestertons fences helps to prevent people from accidentally making catastrophic, irreversible decisions.

happy to elaborate if you'd like, will stop there by default

e.g. the chesterton fence of "respect whoever won the election, regardless of how much you dislike them" → ppl behaving well after the 2000 (?) election, w the hanging chads & all that 

I think I can see pretty good reasons to not escalate to violence and to respect the political process even if you lose, and I don't need to know that this is "the done thing" to figure that out.

It's not the easiest of questions but I still want to challenge you to describe concretely what the world looks like if people aren't using the chesterton's fence heuristic.

(I am also thinking about it.)

sure! give me a min to think.

I think following the local pre-established norms of a scene is usually good form, until you see a clear reason to break one, and then there are rules for how to break norms.

I think this is less true for fashions and choices that aren't about rules — if most people in your town eat at Restaurant A and you want to eat at Restaurant B I don't think there's anything wrong in just going.

I think it's not good to break things randomly or use force. But I guess I'm hearing "do conformity unless you can see a clear reason to do non-conformity" and I'd prefer "do conformity or non-conformity when you think is best rather than default to the former".

Actually writing that out I can see a case for conform-by-default. (That might be my biggest crux with Ronny around privacy...)

I guess without conforming-by-default I would expect people to have awful home-made clothing and not brush their teeth and be taking team meetings sitting on the dirty sidewalk and trying out not eating food for a week and lots of other silly things, because they came up with new ideas but the ideas were not good. Most people cannot do most of their thinking themselves, and the surrounding society is going to do most of your thinking for you.

I guess this perspective makes me want to say "yes, you should definitely go to college if you haven't thought about it very much and haven't got much experience thinking for yourself and testing your own (non-conforming) ideas and seeing whether you can do better or worse on average than your civilization, but for gods' sake please think about it quite a bit and test your non-conformist ideas, this is the prime of your life and I think that many people can do so much better and that college will probably hurt most people in subtle but substantial ways (e.g. buying into credentialism, overlooking corruption, not understanding the difference between knowledge/skills/credentials, etc)".

...perhaps I should write a post on "how to get into non-conformist behavior that is better than conforming".

[i'm intentionally leaving your textbox off-screen, so that i come up with my thoughts independently. feel free to unmute if you'd like me to see what you're typing.]

i'm not sure. this definitely feels like something i'd like to think more about, but at first glance:

• finding things that are seemingly better than pre-existing norms, then people doing those things, then a whole bunch of bad stuff happens in ways that are hard to predict, but that cultural selection solved for anyway.
• i feel dissatisfied & disappointed with my inability to paint a clear picture here, and i'm looking forward to having this now be on the top of my mind. also looking forward to reading your thoughts above, which i haven't yet!

But I guess without conforming-by-default I would expect people to have home-made clothing and not brush their teeth and be taking team meetings sitting on the dirty sidewalk and trying out not eating food for a week and lots of other silly things, because they came up with new ideas but the ideas were not good. Most people cannot do most of their thinking themselves, and the surrounding society is going to do most of your thinking for you.

this, but i think in addition to the "silly things," i can imagine there being seriously harmful things, like ending relationships or physically coercing people.

or making bombs, etc

i have a bunch of questions written out, so i'm going to send a few, and let you answer the ones you want.

Send me a bunch and I can try to answer them all quickly and let you double click?

oh great, yeah that's better

numbers refer to the quotes & commentary/questions below them.

(1)

I believe that your goal in the early years of your life should be to get ~$100k in your bank account …

If you do not have enough money to live without work for 1-2 years, then you will always be beholden to your employment pool …

hmm, it seems to me like that’s the case for, like a 3-6 month pause, which would let you find a job that would extend the “job steering period” for another 1-3 years. having $15k-$30k seems well sufficient for this — $1k rent, $1k food, $1k other, $1k buffer = ~$4k in spend per month.

like, you don’t need enough money to find a perfect job — you need enough money to get into a situation sufficiently stable to find a perfect job.

(2)

most of the places that care about degrees are not healthy places to be.

i think you probably think this is true of me, but do you also think this is true of the median person who goes to college?

(3)

I think you can get this [programming skill] just as well if not better via private tutors and independent study. 

i think this is pretty cheap to say, and might be true, but i’d be interested to hear a more concrete version of what this would look like. particularly re: private tutors.

(4)

However, you can just show up to college without committing to anything. 

i think this is true, but it seems like it misses a huge amount of horrible feeling of “not fitting in” that i experienced over the last year. tho, perhaps the solution here is to get over that feeling?

also, i think this is definitely a bit of a defection. thoughts?

(5)

I think the primary reason that people go to college is to avoid blame.

meh, that & not having seriously considered alternatives in the first place.

(6)

if you’re going to self-determine and run your own life, you shouldn’t be making the biggest decisions in your life for this lame reason [blame].

but like, the blame would still be real? casting light on it can sometimes reduce it, but often doesn’t — even if someone believes that endorsedly. how would you propose someone get over that (likely huge) amount of blame-in-expectation?

(7)

I think that to live a whole and ethical life you need to not be beholden to corrupt institutions — you need to be able to walk out, and not be committed to their credentialist games.

being able to walk out & not being committed to their credentialist games ≠ walking out and not participating in their credentialist game.

Quick responses in order:

1. Thank you for making my argument for me — it's even easier to get enough money to not need to depend on the credentialist college system!
2. I kind of don't know what's up with the median person. They probably watch Marvel movies, which means their life is hell.
3. Tons of YouTube videos, tons of people who you can pay like $50/hour for tutoring, these days there's language models and Copilot and Cursor that you can pay very little per month for tons of feedback and advice, make a little website that does something useful, find people who wants websites and sell them websites that sell their product/business, I think that with a few months of this many people can make enough money to get by. My mother and I have also made fine money tutoring kids 1-1 in math and english.
4. I don't particularly know why you want to fit in and suspect you shouldn't, though I feel guilty saying this and want to flag that I'm in argumentative mode, it is of course nice to fit and have a tribe of nice people. Need to think more about defection, will move on for now in the interest of time...
5. Right.
6. [More thinking needed...]
7. Sure, you can make an argument about how to preserve your walkout rights and sanity while being part of the institution. I guess I'm arguing that if you had them and knew what it could be like, it'd be good to walk out at the start and start a life of coding and blogging on the internet from a nice place in Thailand. This is perhaps a hardcore position.

list of things that i'd be interested in going deeper on:

• re (4), i feel very comfortable with my feelings of not-fitting in, and you should feel comfortable attacking them/leaning into them/etc.
• re (4) & (5), i'd guess this is one of the primary things that's pushing ppl to attend college — and (imo) much more importantly, preventing ppl from sincerely considering not going to college.
• re (7), it seems like the argument you're making is "people should sincerely consider not going to college, and the thing that will tell me that they've sincerely considered it is that they decide to not go." that's obv a bit hyperbolic, but am i missing something here?

On defection... I admit there's something of a free-riding opportunity right now. Is it really that bad? I think you should use it respectfully, and in an equilibrium where hundreds of people do it at the college then that seems bad, but also, isn't it kind of already bad the the gatekeeping of education is so expensive? I think most people within the education system would endorse education being free if people want it and think the high-prices are a sign that something has gone very wrong, and if most people in an institution endorse you interacting with it that way, this is a pretty suggestive sign it's not defecting on the institution.

I guess this is less true for the "access to people and buildings and clubs" which is good to have boundaries on. Hm, I don't currently believe it would be bad for Saul Munn to do this, would need to think more for a broader norm, but time is up.

Lol at 7, but no time to talk.

I don't currently believe it would be bad for Saul Munn to do this, would need to think more for a broader norm,

agreed

so, i think an important part here is that i — and, i think, ben — think that ppl should take the decision about going to college much more seriously than they currently do.

but i also think that people should look at the question of “hey, it looks like everyone else is doing this — in particular the people who’re in my reference class — i should have a pretty strong reason to go against the grain here.” to be clear, i think there are some reasons that are sufficiently strong, but it’s pretty clear to me that most people aren’t very well calibrated about which reasons are sufficiently strong (and which aren’t).

(separately, i think that’s an extremely important skill to build — knowing how to weigh the strength of existing norms, and knowing when your reasons are sufficient to override those existing norms. but i think the place to start building that skill is not when getting an undergrad degree! there are a variety of better, lower-cost-of-failure playgrounds on which one can develop that skill first. in fact, i think an undergrad experience often provides many such settings!)

so, i think that if everyone tried to figure out whether they should attend college from first principles, conditional on them already having pretty good reasoning skills, and being pretty calibrated about when it’s good/reasonable to buck trends/go against the grain/etc, that’d be good. but until that world arrives, i’d much prefer that people blindly follow pre-existing norms, and work hard on their ability to go against the grain when it matters.

now, to turn it back to the dear reader.

the base rate is a hell of a thing. if you’re calling most of the world stupid (shorthand for “unable to calibratedly distinguish between times when they’re right against the consensus vs when the consensus is right”), then you should have an extremely clear & compelling story for why you’re not a part of that stupidity. i think the vast majority of people don’t have such a clear story, and so should default to the consensus norms until they do.

and on a meta level: i also don’t think the vast majority of people have the skills to even evaluate whether their story is sufficiently compelling. which raises the bar even higher — you first have to have a sufficient case for your own evaluative skills, and then also a case for your not following the consensus view.

i think i probably clear the first bar, but not the second. i think most don’t clear either.

i think this might be a bit of a more moderate position than the one expressed in the topic line, but whatever.

It seems to me that the key issue is around Chesterton’s fence. Your society is going to do most of your thinking for you, and it is risky to re-roll on a big thing like college.

My first point is that if you thought about it hard, you could find something better to do. But I guess the argument I have to make is (a) how easy is it to find something better to do, and (b) how much thinking do you need to do to figure out something better to do?

I admit it’s kind of hard and there isn’t a rulebook here. I think it’d be good for more people to do it and publish their rulebooks online. 

I am a bit like “Why should this be harder than most parts of life after college? It’s still hard to find a community and a place to live and hobbies and so forth.” I think that, actually, cities and local universities offer lots of opportunities for community and activities if you go looking and are willing to try things. I maintain that the main difficulty is money, and the main issue you have is to be able to make a decent income while finding interesting and worthwhile people. I think that you can do the latter increasingly online — make a great blog, make accounts on social media, post interesting things, build things and post about those, then announce you’re visiting <major city> for a week and meet as many people as you can, focus on making friends and finding people to work on projects with.

I do think I would encourage trying this out for a while. Take a gap year first to try to make money and make friends in a city, and then decide whether you can keep going or want to take the easy option (college). If you don’t want to bet on making lots of money, pick a city or country with a low cost of living; if you do want to bet on it, then you can be in the big cities like SF, NYC, London, Boston, etc and there’s tons to do and tons of strange people to meet. Again, the internet is a great way to do this, I think you can prolly live somewhere cheap and then travel in by trains or whatever. I think your life should be measured in what you create and what your character is, not by how easy your life is.

There is a river flowing here, from school to college to a credentialist company, and you can just float down the river, but I wish more people didn’t, and I reckon there’s probably a lot of exploits if you try to do better.

My guess is that from an early age (~16) you should try to get valuable skills, and attempt to be able to make your own source of income before you have to accept or decline college. I focus on programming because it can bring in a bunch of money, but generally things with computers (artistic design, spreadsheets / databases, music mixing, video editing, etc) are easier to learn and sell (and also do remotely from places with a low cost of living). I think anyone with an IQ around 2 standard deviations above average and a conscientiousness score above 50th percentile can expect to get away with this lifestyle, which to be clear is about 2% * 0.5 = 1% of people, but also you’re clearly in it. I don’t quite know how much lower you can go on these dimensions and pull this off (I sadly am not above 50th percentile conscientiousness).

Anyhow, I have attempted to point more concretely to what you can do instead, and argued that at least 1% of people are in this category, that includes you and many people that you know.

But I guess the argument I have to make is (a) how easy is it to find something better to do, and (b) how much thinking do you need to do to figure out something better to do?

+1 — though i’ll also note that “easy” includes “emotionally easy,” i.e. “how much blame will society/your family/yourself/etc heap on you if you make the wrong decision”

I admit it’s kind of hard and there isn’t a rulebook here. I think it’d be good for more people to do it and publish their rulebooks online.

if the “do” here is “seriously consider dropping out, and seriously look into what they would be doing if they did drop out,” then i strongly agree. i’ve written a few (extremely lucid/train-of-thought/babbly, and very not-public) decision docs surrounding various decisions i’ve made — e.g. [see note below] taking a semester off, taking another semester off, applying to transfer unis, and going back to college — which i’ve sent to others in similar situations, and which they’ve found useful.

[Note for the reader: in the original dialogue, each of "(1) taking a semester off, (2) taking another semester off, (3) applying to transfer unis, and (4) going back to college" was hyperlinked with an associated "decision doc." Saul removed the links to his decision docs given the personal nature of the content. Readers should feel free to ask Saul privately for a copy, but note that he’s unlikely to send them to you without meeting you first.]

I think that, actually, cities and local universities offer lots of opportunities for community and activities if you go looking and are willing to try things.

this is only true for those who’ve already built the requisite skills of seeking them out. i think the typical undergrad experience is pretty good at building a lot of those skills for a lot of people.

I maintain that the main difficulty is money

i’ll admit that my experience of this aspect of college is pretty tainted by coming from a fairly well-off family, where my grandparents are able to pay for most of my education, which makes tuition/other relevant costs less salient (though still very real, given that their money will eventually become, to some extent, mine.)

Take a gap year first to try to make money and make friends in a city

yes. so completely agreed. also, potentially do this after one year of college, so that you have both a lot of grounded experience about what it’s like to not be in college, and about what it’s like to be in college.

i’ve said for a while to myself & my friends that i think it’s a serious shame that most people have to decide where to attend college before having ever experienced life at college; but, also, i’m now realizing that i think it’s a veritably worse shame that most people have to decide to go to college before having ever experienced life at college — nor life outside of college.

your life should be measured in what you create and what your character is, not by how easy your life is.

fantastic quote, going in my next quotes sequence.

There is a river flowing here, from school to college to a credentialist company, and you can just float down the river, but I wish more people didn’t, and I reckon there’s probably a lot of exploits if you try to do better.

i agree with this really strongly. see e.g. “Things You’re Allowed to Do: University Edition.” but i do think that most people should probably still drift down most of that river — but they should (a) do so knowingly, and (b) probably, at some point, seriously consider getting off.

I think anyone with an IQ around 2 standard deviations above average and a conscientiousness score above 50th percentile can expect to get away with this lifestyle

i think this is a pretty great filter for “can they calibratedly distinguish between times when they’re right against the consensus vs when the consensus is right.”

Okay, we agree that they should take the decision more seriously. (I mean, to be fair, I guess I should advocate for something they should think about less if I want them to think about this more, but we agree on this so I'll move on for now.) There’s a broad thing here of “actually be thinking and optimizing your life” that seems like a prerequisite.

Yeah, yeah, you convinced me on the Chesterton’s fence thing.

My guess is our disagreement isn’t really about whether someone has a clear and compelling reason for thinking they can do better than civilization (which is actually a common occurrence), but is more like “what is the risk/reward tradeoff in this case and how reliably can you do better” and this is one where even if on average you can do better than your civilization, the risk-reward tradeoff is massive and it can basically just fuck up your whole life to not take a good route here.

Like, I am not on Twitter, and I think this is a better choice for most people, and this wasn’t like “Wow, such hubris”, I think it’s just not that hard to notice that it makes me more anxious and sleep worse and think the worst of people by default. And that when I dropped it for 6-10 months, when I came back and read what I missed, I felt I had really missed very little of worth.

I think that part of my intuition here is that the value of college has dropped a lot, and so many people who have good alternatives should just take them (e.g. a good startup, or if you know you have a stable career alternative option doing something you think is meaningful), but I have updated toward it being more reasonable than I thought at the outset compared to the baseline of “just don’t go and start finding work immediately”.

I think I believe “it is not that hard to notice if you have a better option” rather than “everyone obviously has a better option”. Strong evidence is common, after all.

I loathed my college experience quite considerably. It didn’t teach me much of any use, repeatedly made me feel like a failure, and led me along false narratives of status and its own self-importance, while I got real-world skills and eventually a career through working on side-projects. My guess is that it’s still worth it for most people to take that route, but I do think this is a terrible shame, and you should leap on other opportunities if you find them, and actively pursue them, and our civilization would do better to make it easier for people to explore and find them and just learn actually useful skills like web design and spreadsheets rather than competing for 4 years to signal intelligence.