General Discussion

This is especially true when you are privileged enough to ascend in the real world with a slim talent set.

It is not about a “fancy” degree. I am a mediocre/failed scientist, although after pondering this deeply (and frequently miserably), I concluded recently that I am not unintelligent, spoilt and entitled as I had assumed and indeed been given to understand, but screwed over more than I could admit to myself.

I came to this conclusion on Feb 26, 2026, to be precise, when I found out that my sleazy local hospital had been acquired by Blackstone Inc in 2023..long complicated story…

But to return to the topic at hand, education taught me how not to break shit. Breaking shit casually is the worst part of the dropout culture lionized by Si Valley.

This is true both of the people who never get penalized as well as the ones who do: Bill Gates (Seattle which is not in Si Valley technically, but shares the same mindset and worldview), Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes (who made the mistake of piling onto medicine with the same crap) etc.

To put it in the simplest terms: except in software engineering (minus cybersecurity and some parts of the system that handle work/health/finance data and human life in non-trivial ways), not having an education raises the odds that you break shit when you are privileged and lumber into areas that require skill, expertise and affect a lot of people.

A more well-rounded understanding of reality always helps in the non-virtual world (typically called the real world).

I myself have no use for snobbery. But education does help you give a shit when you are already privileged as all these drop-outs are.

If you are poorer and underprivileged, the odds are low on average that you would ever be in positions where you break stuff. And when you do, you are likelier to end up as the fall guy for our parasitic ruling class. We are generally horribly mean-spirited as a society to the poorer.

But these privileged dropouts have a high nuisance value. It sounds like this guy is fairly well off. He chose not to get an education.

On the flip side education alone will not reduce your nuisance value if you are like JD Vance or Lawrence Summers/most economists. They net a drain on the planet in spite of education.

But on average it can work to reduce the nuisance value of the better off people, who are responsible for a significant portion of our problems, although all humans have the potential to contribute to destruction and hellscapes. Our immense nuisance value to the planet and each other is what distinguishes us from other species.

Such blithering delusional megalomania is less common in the hard sciences outside of software engineering, which unlike hardware engineering or cybersecurity, floats along in fantasy worlds of gaming, llms/other bullshit ai, while propped up by totally inadequate, fraudulent, ossified and corrupt economic models promising eternal growth, in collusion with a corrupt tech press. I am not saying all ai/gaming etc are necessarily bad. Just that most of it is out of touch with our out of control trainwreck.

I was just reading Christopher Ketcham, one of the few sane voices in this bleak wilderness:

https://www.christopherketcham.com/

This is unrealistic..so much of the global economy by now is built on unsustainable extractive mining and without education it is harder to counter the brainwashing of the truisms this society is awash in (which people pick up by osmosis).