How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

It's not unpopular at all. Watch Silicon Valley. The very first skit is Peter Gregory talking about why school is bad...this is the opposite message of Adam Sandler in Mr. Deeds.

I think you are right but I think that also is going to be part and parcel of traditional colleges changing. You absolutely cannot replace the role of college community nor tenured professors working with you in person. It, in my experience, doesn't translate to online. You need these people for mentorship and to offer constructive and informed criticism of your work. We as humans need the socialization so we don't turn into cranks.

HN and SV despise schooling sometimes, but we as a society don't progress without it being dominant in some form or fashion.

Funnily enough, that scene ends with some dude yelling "fascist!" and walking out. I never knew how uncannily accurate of a parody that stuff was until I started posting on HN.

I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from):

"A scientist would fearlessly peer into the Gates of Hell if he thought it would advance his knowledge."

I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.

And besides, I don't see much elitism in S&E professions based on the college. Employers don't care if you hail from MIT or UW if you can get s*t done.

> Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits).

I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats.

The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck.

What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening.

So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.

I'm not sure if you know this but as vast as wikipedia is, its content probably accounts for far less than 1% of the historical content that is out there.

A front line historian distills tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages into a lengthy dissertation or book. That document is likely too dense to be of much interest to you or I. But another historian writing popular history books might reference it and also use some of its citations to quickly find interesting primary sources.

In this way, a 500 page popular history book may be distilled from a hundred other 500 page books which themselves are distilled from thousands of pages of primary source material. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an archive. So it's not really the appropriate place to house anything but the most distilled of these products. Essentially, all the other material is not relevant. But it's necessary to produce the relevant stuff.

As an example, you can read the wikipedia on Lord Nelson. You'll find most of his major life events listed there. But if you buy even the lightest biography on the man you'll find much more. Why? Are the people curating Lord Nelson's page lazy for not including those details? Of course not. The Lord Nelson page is probably obnoxiously over edited. But there is probably more of a fight about what not to include than what to include. Because the article seeks to be a relevant encyclopedia entry not an exhaustive resource.

My town's coal mine history may warrant a brief mention on wikipedia but not much more than that. However, if someone were to start composing a book on say labor organizing in Western Washington state, they might be interest to consult our archive and the distilled work our historian has done. More importantly, if a historian invented an interesting mode of statistical analysis, having that raw data already partially curated could move them a long way forward. This happens pretty often. A historian comes up with a novel way to count some interesting historical phenomena and they can only do it because some enterprising local historians whiled away hours collecting specific relevant information.

Intesting discoveries about historical economies come from counting of mills and bridges and other mundane activities. The path travelled by important historical figures come from historians stitching together news items and diary entries gathered by a local obsessive historian. And so on.

Yes! I wish more people realized all of this is unnecessary. Sit down to your keyboard and start typing! You will fail, that's correct - learn from that failure, don't take it personally and never stop!

So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.