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There are things you know, things you don't know, and things you don't know you don't know.

College is pretty good about the last category, but really if you went through syllabi, scanned through lecture notes, and paged through the reading materials listed, you're probably ahead of most students in that category.

That exercise alone will probably give you a good idea of the technical value of the education.

I would add that words don't have objective complete meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas and ideas are like raw marble in your head, carved into meaningful shapes by working with and manipulating those ideas.

If you bring out a word like "consistency", college is very much about shaping the idea behind that word into increasingly more crisp and formal meanings, especially meanings that can then interact with ideas behind other words like "atomicity" or "scale".



Even for someone with a degree in philosophy I think the last couple paragraphs are over-thinking things a lot here. I have never heard university described that way. The Rumsfeld thing about "unknowns unknowns" is clever I guess. :)




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