The Problem of Being Uneducated Or Anti-Academia

[jennifer_bloom]

I’m Chinese and I’ve always had conflicts with uneducated people

A thin and rich millionaire’s wife I used to talk to flunked out of three university’s and community schools and she is never intelligent enough to know when her opinion is wrong or when something outside her life experience has merit and value.

Recently I asked her if my rejection of employment letter to my boss was acceptable and she said it wasn’t because it was too long and I had gone into too much detail about my family life which seemed unprofessional

What she didn’t consider was that I was trying to avoid arousing the bosses Jealousy by making her wonder why she was returning to work but her employees weren’t and for that reason chose to go into detail about how my family pressured to quit my job.

Or that the letter was long to adequately emphasis how apologetic I was and that disclosing information about my situation was more important than giving her a short email

An educated person is willing to consider that other people’s views might be more intelligent than her own while an uneducated person is not willing to consider that

Another issue with this friend was that she had more sexual experience than me and every time I talked about a relationship I was trying to start she would get angry and dismissive assuming my relationship was not real because it had not been consummated in the physical world

She isn’t intelligent enough to realize that often times the emotional involvement you get from a progressive and slow courtship where emotional investment is made builds up tension and that men care more about those who can excite their heart than those who excite their bodies

She also saw no value in words and mocked me for thinking internet relationships are real friendships not knowing the beauty, diversity and power of spoken language and how it can cure illness

She also told me I was stupid cause I said the weather was colder on sunny days in the winter time then cloudy days not realizing the clouds trap the heat under the clouds making more warm air closer to ground when the sky is cloudy

My education didn’t teach me how to think - it taught me to think for myself and appreciate other people’s points or view

[Kezzz]

All I know is, no matter what stage of life you are at... a little bit of education doesn't hurt and takes you a long way.

[Jjpayne]

Education helps you for sure to have more understand of yourself and the world around you

[Jjpayne]

*understanding

[Jjpayne]

Thank you :)

[IlyaTheImpaler]

A problem I've seen with anti academia people is they have an inferiority complex. These people don't actually know anything about academia aside from what they saw on mainstream television, but if you ask them about academia the first thing they would say is something like "education doesn't mean X" or "I know a guy with PhD who is dumb" or "the smartest guy I know is a janitor" etc. bonus point if they pretend to be from academia themselves and start talking about their "IQ" (lol). They usually get super touchy and mention IQ out of nowhere, how they have a high IQ and how it doesn't "measure intelligence" and how there are many types of intelligence, etc. A rant about IQ is a sign of this inferiority complex, academics don't care about IQ.

These people like to appeal to some rare cases like autodidact geniuses to downplay formal education, ignoring the huge statistical correlation between intelligent people who actually do something useful for society and people who are formally educated. The lack of understanding of basic statistics is the reason uneducated people are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and propaganda. It also shows the true irony, the anti academia people who preach about self taught knowledge can't learn things that even school children can learn on their own. In fact from my experience in programming competitions, the people who can actually teach themselves something are always people who had an education in something else, and never the uneducated script kiddies who just copy snippets of code from others.

Another irony is uneducated people often trashtalk academia while using the product of academic research (virtually all technological advances either originate from academia or were created with essential catalysts from academia). From what I've seen on this site the more uneducated people are the more often they pretend to know some topic from some cursory googling and start making big claims without genuine understanding. They behave in the same way as parrots. Initially it was jarring to me, but after awhile I just ignore them.

I'm gonna end this post with the favorite anecdote of the anti academia people: Bill Gates.

As an undergrad, Bill Gates took algorithm course under Christos Papadimitriou, and they published a paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682
Yes, Bill Gates was more of a traditionally trained academic than your modern PhD student. He dropped out when his friend Allen asked him to help build and sell an interpreter (BASIC), which is similar to what modern day freshmen at my school could do at the end of their intro course (see how far have we come?) That was the start of Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen#Microsoft

And the funny thing is, being a dropout Bill Gates never trusted his company to another dropout. He actually tried to kick Allen (the other dropout) out, and succeeded. He only recruited people with degrees to actually build things. Actually the same was true for Zuckerberg, Musk, Jobs etc. (you can apply for a job at their companies websites if you dont believe me). In fact Bill Gates handed CEO position to his former classmate Steve Balmer who scored higher than him in Putnam competition and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.

[AndrewMG]

I'm university educated but I'd query the theory that makes me intelligent. Intelligence comes in all different kinds of forms. A sports person with a low IQ can have brilliant spacial awareness, that's intelligent in my eyes. An Actress/Actor that dropped out of school at 16 but can make an audience connect with them is intelligence. A comedian who failed their exams but has the ability to take a member of the audience away from their mundane life for a few seconds and make them laugh is intelligent. Me on the other hand is a university graduate in a mundane job who can pass a few IQ test's and get a high score, Academia is overestimated... true intelligence is what you do with the talent you've been given.

[RedHatWitch]

🙌☀️🙌
Totally agree with you.
Its also hard to arguments with people with no education or anti-academia.

I feel you, 3 of my close family members are... and I try to avoid that kind of conversations..

[NYCQuestions1976]

I can state with factual certainty that spoken language does NOT cure illnesses. I come from a long line of big mouth yammer boxes. If what you posted was even remotely accurate, me and everyone I was related to would all live to be 250 years old.

[Liam_Hayden]

If you think education = wisdom, you are sorely mistaken.