Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

The collapse of (most of) the university system's credentialing power (and *fingers crossed* an attendant local-level revolt against occupational licensing).

This implies a massive increase in information costs without a replacement. Are you betting on this resulting from macro-level decrease in info costs or a replacement credential that's similarly info-dense + higher signal?

What nobody wants to say: everything captured in a typical college degree could also be captured by an IQ test + the evidenced willingness to sit down and copy the Bible, word for word, by hand, over 4 years. The ability to credential *actual skills* has amassed a GIANT pot.

1/2 While I agree with your last sentence, I think there's more signal in a college degree. For a (relatively) small group of effective autodidacts, there's low or no value. But forced-ish exposure to new ideas builds useful frameworks for a lot of people.

Yep, this is the "critical thinking"/"human development"/"personal growth" argument that people keep repeating, over and over, without providing any evidence that it's anything more than wishful thinking. Strongly suggest you read Caplan's book.

I will read his book, but I don't think that's my argument. I would never have picked up an economics textbook when I was 18. Being forced to take some classes and then learning specific, substantive things in those classes was valuable (to me, at least).

If it were valuable to you, you wouldn't have had to do it at financial gunpoint. You can see why this might look like cultural Stockholm Syndrome, right?

I do see that. And it might be that. People aren't generally good at isolating deeply held biases in their arguments. But I think that the obligation to show up made me invest time in learning things that turned out to be more valuable than what I would have done otherwise.