Yeah, I'll just call myself a surgeon and pick it up as I go along. No problem!

Who needs to spend time learning from best academic minds in CS? I can just tweet to some jackass Javascript 'rockstar'!

I'll just teach myself philosophy by reading these library books! I don't need some stuffy Oxford tutor who has been doing it for their whole life passing on their knowledge one-to-one!

Civil engineering? Making mistakes is how you learn!

I don't need a network and credentials! I'll just apply to this government policy institute with my GitHub profile and some retarded PHP library.

You people are fucking deluded. I can't believe tech has become so anti-intellectual.

You're not learning from the best academic minds, and if you were that would be a bad thing anyway.

Having the best academic minds teaching Bachelors, or even Masters level comp sci is a waste of resources. They might be an excellent researcher but most of what you're covering is not particularly new or controversial and can be better taught by someone whose main skillset lies in the realm of teaching rather than research.

The idea that you need someone who might otherwise be doing important work to turn up and read their power-point presentation to a bunch of undergrads in order for them to learn is retarded. Almost anyone with a decent familiarity with comp sci could be reading that stuff, or the students could be reading it from one of the many books on the subject.

Lectures were originally there, as I recall, so that people could copy down from the extremely rare book that was being read, and with very few exceptions little has changed in that regard with respect to education.

And what the hell's your distribution for best anyway? I went to university, didn't meet anyone smarter than myself. I'm probably not a genius but since none of the professors were trying to do anything hard in our presence....

The best argument for university has nothing to do with professors, it has to do with other students you'll meet and having the chance to argue over subjects with them and work on projects with them. But that you need to be in a lecture hall with the best minds to learn? That's just cargo-cult bullshit.

I agree with you. Part of going to college is using their funding to get access to their equipment. Most people have no chance of getting to use a particle accelerator unless they go to uni or work with one.

You also get to hang out with a bunch of people doing similar things. You compete with them; you learn from them; you learn by teaching them.

You get to talk to people who have done important things in the field you're working in.

Of course, this is all in the ideal situation. Unfortunately modern education seems, for many people, to be "cram 'em in to get the funding". The education is secondary. Certainly some universities in the UK appear to be just extensions of 6th form education, and not the launchpad into proper academic rigorousness that they should be. (Not all, obviously. There's a lot of great work coming out of uni's.)

Here's what I think people are missing: if you don't go to college then you don't know what you don't know. These people with no education think they know it all anyway, but that's because they're blind to what they could have learned.

It makes me angry because it's so fucking arrogant! There are people working at colleges who have a lifetime of experience, hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and grants, and people just think they can teach themselves all of that without any of their help!

The anti-intellectualism in tech is quite surprising today. I find it shocking that we live in the age of CS yet great professors are quitting their faculty jobs to do startups and working at Google. I think the problem is lack of social status and compensation mismatch. Physicians still get some respect. Professors and researchers don't.

I'll save space, since you've covered my points nicely. I've taken apart a scanning electron microscope, built a transistor from scratch (with vacuum deposition and self-built masks), phase locked lasers, fully solved the hydrogen atom from first principles, and met tons of awesome people I'd never have had the nerve to meet otherwise.

College opens doors. It's as simple as that; no guarantees other than it surely helps. Some can be self taught and build their own doors, but the rest of us mortals don't want to wait two decades to be allowed to do engineering work. I'd rather play with toys _today_.

I was with you until the last part. Pretty stupid to smear an entire group of people based on the views of a smaller chunk of its members.

I retract that then, but I honestly think that anti-intellectualism is a serious and disturbing problem in the tech community. It's like these people want to take us to a dark age of not really understanding anything beyond a superficial level.

I somewhat agree, but it's a very specific part of the tech community, not tech generally. Probably a part that's over-represented on discussion forums, though. I think of the anti-intellectual parts as mostly rooted in the startup community, especially the corners of startups that focus strongly on biz/money stuff and quick exits. Partly that's because their incentives almost require a quick-and-dirty approach: if your timeframe to product is 6 months and to exit is 3-5 years, you really can't do a lot of R&D work, but instead need to pick some off-the-shelf (or nearly so) tech, quickly productize it, and put most of your focus on finding market niches and developing business strategy.

There are other parts of the tech community with a much different tone. There's academia itself, of course: I'd consider folks like the machine-learning and robotics communities to be part of the "tech community". And in industry, there are places like Microsoft Research and some parts of Google, doing things like designing F# and advancing NLP. Even at less explicitly "researchy" places, a lot of companies value people with solid science/engineering fundamentals.

There is a huge difference between being anti-intellectual, and anti-institutional.

Extremely well said. It's not anti-intellectual to point out that tuition rates have vastly outpaced cost of living and inflation markers, and that ROI on undergraduate degrees are dropping like a rock.