[Eliezer]

> There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that past knowledge

And the amount of damage done by universities is now so severe that I've switched from telling people "Don't try following in my footsteps" to telling them "Okay, maybe you should get the hell out of school."

[_delirium]

I guess I haven't found much outright damage myself, though maybe I got lucky. Whether it was the best or most cost-effective way to learn stuff (not counting the employability value of the degree) is another question, but my comp. sci. degree imo was a reasonably useful way of learning some CS basics. Some of the choice of topics was arbitrary and would've been different at another school, but it's all stuff I should eventually have learned anyway.

[realitygrill]

That's interesting. What do you recommend they do instead? [I know you're an autodidact, and so am I - apparently you're a lot better at it than I am though]