Comment by NoGravitas
4 days ago
> like Dianetics, Sequences wouldn't be appealing if you were at all well read.
That would require an education in the humanities, which is low status.
4 days ago
> like Dianetics, Sequences wouldn't be appealing if you were at all well read.
That would require an education in the humanities, which is low status.
Well, there is "well read" and "educated" which aren't the same thing. I started reading when I was three and checked out ten books a week from the public library throughout my youth. I was well read in psychology, philosophy and such long before I went to college -- I got a PhD in a STEM field so I didn't read a lot of that stuff for classes [1] I still read a lot of that stuff.
Perhaps the reason why Stanford and Oxford students are impressed by that stuff is that they are educated but not well read which has a few angles: STEM privileged over the humanities, the ride of Dyslexia culture, and a shocking level of incuriosity in "nepo baby" professors [2] who are drawn to the profession not because of a thirst for knowledge but because it's the family business.
[1] did get an introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument and took a relatively "woke" (in a good way) Shakespeare class such that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troilus_and_Cressida is my favorite
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/