The Altucher Confidential

[SMZ]

James Altucher's 8 Alternatives to College, read with the links especially this one.

 

[tape]

I've seriously considered traveling the world as an alternative to going to college (antisocial adopting a nomad hermit attitude? yes please), but the prospect of learning a career I'm so very interested in (Chemical Engineering) and actually being able to use it professionally is very exciting, to me.

But hey we'll see when I end college???

 

[Morm]

Create art? You can go to university and get trained to make art. This guy just sounds bitter about being bad at academics.

Maybe if people take degrees that aren't "masters in the beatles" or "Recreation, Travel and Leisure" they will learn something.

 

[Hipmonlee]

You can go to university and get trained to make art.

Except thats not actually really what happens when you take an arts course.

Like, composition, which I took for three years was more music appreciation plus discussions about what we were writing at the time. It wasnt so much that I didnt learn anything, but more that I wasnt taught anything. We just discussed composition a lot..

But yeah, it definitely makes a difference what you take. Just to repeat what I have said a lot: Dont do management, marketing or philosophy papers. Then you really wont learn anything.

If composition doesnt include things like species counterpoint or whatever (which in my course was a separate paper called techniques and technologies or something), then it isnt really going to teach you a lot, though it is always nice to get other viewpoints on what you write, you just dont need to go to university for that.

Have a nice day.

 

[ivar]

Dont do management, marketing or philosophy papers. Then you really wont learn anything.

philosophy major + math minor here: that's a load of bullshit. philosophy in my opinion is the best way to test exegetical skill, logical deduction and reading comprehension. next to math kids, philosophy kids outperform everyone else on the lsat, as well as outperform all majors on gre and are middle of the pack for gmat (which isn't bad considering philosophy isn't a maths course).

how much of philosophy is practical? technically, everything practical is philosophical (practical was originally a word that meant 'pertaining to morals') but in the traditional usage of the word 'practical', yeah not so much. maybe useful to incorporate into other disciplines (like linguistics for example) but academic philosophy is an ivory tower circle jerk, as i've called it before. so there;s that

but philosophy papers, in good schools of course, subject students to rigour, precision and logic that other humanities and social sciences subjects cannot even compare to. it's really not even close.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Yes but on the other hand you could be doing maths (or linguistics).

Is your argument really that philosophy is a worthwhile subject, or that humanities are often taught poorly? I mean philosophy is a field that demands clarity of language, because it is essentially discussion of language disguised as something else, so I could understand that generally your teachers will not overlook this. But really any (or at least some) humanity should be equally demanding. It is fair enough to say that usually they arent though.

Have a nice day.