Fire and Knowledge

More Americans now declare bankruptcy each year than graduate from college.

—Richard Evans, The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me (2006), p. 6

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or craft…. Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 238.

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

—Charles Darwin, as quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 266.

Abraham Piper says that “deciding against college is like deciding to not graduate from high school.” Here was my comment:

College can be a waste of time and money. Steve Jobs only had a semester of college. Bill Gates dropped out after two years. And they didn’t do too bad.

If you’re going to be a doctor, engineer, academic or something similar, college is necessary. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, it’s often not.

Self-education is very easy these days. You can even listen to professors through The Teaching Company that you’d have to go to ivy league schools to hear. Books abound. Knowledge on any topic is a couple clicks away.

I disagree that “deciding against college is like deciding to not graduate from high school.” I think a high school education (or equivalent) is necessary for most decent jobs unless you’re starting your own business or have connections. But college is often overlooked if the person has the experience and skills required. I know lots of stupid people who have attended college, and many smart people who have not. When looking at a resume, I mainly look at what they’ve accomplished, not what school they’ve attended.

Of course I’m a bit biased here, having dropped out of college myself and having no desire to go back.

What do you think?

I was pretty stupid by the time I got to college. I’m not sure how that happened since I had spent 12 years of my life sitting in a classroom. I learned to write a research paper not in high school but in college, for instance. So it’s with some personal feeling that I agree with this quote.

If the universities teach high school courses because the students are not prepared for university courses, then they simply relieve the high schools of their duty and in the process make themselves unable to do their own duty.

—Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the University” in Home Economics (1986), p. 88.

Plain talk will not be easily achieved in corporate America. Too much vanity is on the line. Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking: a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 175.

Not every branch of science can foretell the future—paleontology can’t—but many can and with stunning accuracy. If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you’ll do much better with scientists. They will tell you where on Earth to stand, when you have to be there, and whether it will be a partial eclipse, a total eclipse, or an annular eclipse. They can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance.

You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anemia, or you can take vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you’re interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want (left-right, a boy; forward-back, a girl—or maybe it’s the other way around), but they’ll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy (here, 99 percent accuracy), try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? There isn’t a religion on the planet that doesn’t long for a comparable ability—precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed skeptics—to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close.

Is this worshipping at the altar of science? Is this replacing one faith by another, equally arbitrary? In my view, not at all. The directly observed success of science is the reason I advocate its use. If something else worked better, I would advocate something else.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 30.

My final and perhaps my best reason for not owning a computer is that I do not wish to fool myself. I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil. I do not see why I should not be as scientific about this as the next fellow: when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.

—Wendell Berry, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 171.