No Stupid Questions

College degrees are usually a way to differentiate the rich and poor not prove how smart someone is.

It's even worse when you find out they're not acting.

If you're in the US, bachelor degrees are pretty worthless lol.

Some people are very intelligent in their area(s) of expertise, but are alarmingly senseless outside of a lab/classroom/office environment. The “clueless professor” trope wasn’t just made up for laughs; it’s real. I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve talked to spouses who love the “brilliant moron” they’re married to. Some people with degrees acknowledge their limitations with good humor, others don’t.

Look up Cipolla's laws of stupidity, pretty much sums it up.

A four year degree, for the most part, proves you can hand in coursework and pass tests. It does not demonstrate the ability to apply any of that education in the real world, nor does it demonstrate any ability to acquire and apply new knowledge outside of a classroom setting.

When you look at careers where the application of knowledge and critical thinking are vital to the work, all of them tend to have some kind of post-graduate schooling or follow-on apprenticeship where one works under an experienced professional, and even people in those fields can be pretty fucking stupid when it comes to things outside of their specialty...

Staring at teacher's boring Powerpoint presentations and reading through a chapter an hour before a test only to forget it after doesn't magically make you a smart person. In fact, I felt more like it numbs the brain.

You major in like 1 specific thing... it doesn't turn your brain into an Artificial General Intelligence

Why would you expect them to be immune to stupidity?

Because it's the emotional inner world that defines how people behave, not education or knowledge or wisdom.

All humans think fast and slow

College is not a test of intelligence. It's a test of your parents' finances, perhaps, and your ability to conform and play the game, and in some cases one's willingness to cheat as well. In my experience very few people come out of college any smarter than they went in, and given the preponderance of people who seem to major in beer the opposite may in fact be true.

What worries me is not the number of people who manage to stumble through college and still some out the other side stupid. Based on my personal experience with my client base, what keeps me up at night is the sheer majority of people who apparently cannot read and possess no critical thinking skills whatsoever and probably shouldn't be trusted to tie their own shoelaces, but some asshole still saw fit to issue these people drivers' licenses, insurance policies, mortgages, and allow them to buy giant SUVs and guns.

If you identify educated people as drastically different from you, perhaps they are just trying to fit in when they're around you.

Higher learning teaches students how to think critically (or develop a very good short term memory).

But it doesn’t necessarily teach students TO think critically.

They’re taught the tools they can use, but using those tools takes effort and causes discomfort. So most people choose to use them as little as possible.

So, the main difference is: people (speaking generally) who have some post-high school education have developed the tools to approach a topic in an intelligent manner. This means that, given enough effort, you can help them understand a topic. Without that toolkit, trying to show them how something is more likely true based on evidence is often pointless. But having that toolkit isn’t going to make them automatically come to evidence-based conclusions.

because getting a degree is more about dodging Pedos and school shootings while paying the check than any kind of learning

Care to give an example?