Ask Lemmy

Cool. I live the most educated city in the USA by many standards.

Most people who live here are educated nominally, but they are mostly passionate about TV shows and sports, or their uninformed political opinions. And even with the high level of education, 45%, or about 1 in 2 people, don't hold a college degree.

Where are all these 'experts' you claim exist? I don't ever see them even in my own city. Now if I go the MFA, yeah I am much more likely to meet someone who has a passion/expertise for art, but the majority of folks that go there are not experts or passionate, they are just doing there for a 'thing to do' or they are a tourist.

If I want to find experts on topics, you go to podcasts or youtubes or read books. You don't talk to people on the street. My barista isn't going to want to talk about the Dutch East India Company, the are going to want to talk about the Patriots game today. They probably have a BA or a MA even, but they probably aren't interested in talking about what they studied because to them college was just a thing they had to do because someone told them to do it and they just went through the motions of their education rather than had any passion or dedicated interest in their studies.

I am not even making this up. Many people I have known here over the years have little to no interest in anything other than what is immediately application to their job or what they do for entertainment. I've met dozens of dozens of PhDs who don't have any passion or interest in their own work, other than the money it brings them to go travel or go to restaurants, and they only do those things based on what is trending on IG. They have no interest in Greek history, but they saw the pretty picture of the island with the white houses and they want to go to Greece now so they can also take the same selfie. And if I talk about Greek history in terms of my own interest of that topic, or that I studied Attic Greek for two years, I'm a straight up weirdo freak to them and they usually start in with the passive aggressive insults about why I 'would waste my time on useless stupid things like that'.

I also grew up in a small rural town, where nobody was educated, and well, it was leagues leagues worse there. The only 'expertise' anyone had was again, focused on TV sports or Top20 pop music. Nobody I knew back then had any expertise or knowledge of anything outside of basic blue collar jobs that they mostly hated and resented.

I especially remember halfway through graduate school, when I learned most of my cohort and most of my professors, didn't even like what they were doing. The image of a professor who has a deep passion for their work... is not most of the academic population. They just did it because 'they couldn't they of anything else to do and they got good grades'. They had no passion for their field, they just saw it as the path of least resistance for their lives. I remember my ethics professor telling me his true passion was playing guitar and tennis and he became an academic because his parents were both academics and it was the easiest thing for him to do, he was also utterly shocked that I came from uneducated hill folk and my parents were funding my PhD like his did.