Can one still be a polymath in modern days like they used to be 500-600+ years ago...

you're probably a pseud and he was just tired of hearing you talk

This. I know a lot of "self-educated" guys who think they've broken the bounds of human reason. They're pretty much all retarded and don't know enough to see how wrong they are.

My first point would be that if a friend tells you that he will not take your opinion seriously, then he is not a good friend.

A degree is a physical token of proof that you have concluded a directed study. A degree does not enhance your understanding or arguments, only serves as evidence of completion. However, earmarked books of Mises, Hayek, Locke and Marx also serve as demonstrable proof that you have completed some study in the area.

If you're so interested go through some lectures on the Internet. It will either reinforce what you already know or further your understanding.

I understand my level of knowledge on the subject might be lower than his, but still, being dismissed like that felt bad. It even felt like he was mocking me.

We were just discussing while drinking a cup of coffee, nothing serious. I was telling him that he should not only read about right wing politicians, philosophers, etc. (His university is well known in my country for its full right anti left ideology). I suggested he should read a bit more about the left to completely understand what he was to deal with in the future, not only limiting himself to Marx and Lenin, because the left is much more than that. While I don't fully support neither capitalism-liberalism or communism-socialism, I think there are some good ideas in both, not only in capitalism-liberalism, as he and his university think. I recommended him to read a bit about Clement Attlee, Josip Broz Tito and Atatürk, so he could see that some lefties actually had a few good ideas and policies (not saying they were the best political leaders ever or anything like that).

He basically told me it is no use, that I only know about politics and economy what I read in school and Wikipedia, that I am not prepared to talk social sciences in an academic level, that history is not the same as modern times and it does not apply today. (He has never read shit about them though)

This was my fear. I am trying to avoid being just a pseudo intellectual retard.

He's an idiot. Currently, what he is learning is not any different from what you can learn. He simply has better facilities for it in the form of professors whereas you have to make do with books and the Internet. So far what you can learn is not going to be different from what he can learn at university. It's only when he enters the workplace this changes, then he has experience to use, but that doesn't change the fact that you can learn more and and better understand the theory and history behind various subjects.
>He basically told me it is no use
>that I only know about politics and economy what I read in school and Wikipedia
>that I am not prepared to talk social sciences in an academic level
>that history is not the same as modern times and it does not apply today. (He has never read shit about them though)
Is he stupid? I hope you understand what I mean. Obviously he is studying law so he has the capabilities to do that, but is he "stupid"? Nothing you've said so far has shown him as knowing more or understanding things better because of what he is studying, if anything from what you've written it sounds like he knows less. Maybe he's saying these things hoping you'll back down from trying to talk about something he's supposed to know more about, but doesn't.

No, making advances in a particular field today requires you to devote your life to it solely.

NO, Government schools have robbed us of a proper education.

although there are shite teachers out there. The good ones have a more profound influence. At least in my experience. Ironically one of my favorite teachers was a huge Carlin fan.

I'm glad I found this thread.
I'm battling with this "paradox of choices" for way too long. I have interest and have been reading literature on multiple subjects for the past 2 years and I can't say what I truly want to do with my life. I would like to know a lot in multiple fields but I am aware of a saying "Jack of all trades and a master of none".

I am sure all of this started due to my undergrad in multimedia where I had classes in design, web development, audio engineering and video production. I like to be able to do a lot of things on a particular level and improve further by specializing, but my problem is that I don't know what to devote my life to.

I want to do another degree in one of these fields but I still can't decide. Well actually, I do have 1 or 2 of my preferences but going to a college for them would be, for a certain reason, impossible in my country, or at least in my city. That's what troubles me the most so I had furthered my interest in even more fields and now I'm stuck in a similar situation as the OP, where I read about a lot of things and I'm afraid it will ultimately get me nowhere.

Since I'm on Veeky Forums, maybe someone could recommend me some books on this subject. E.g. "Letters to a young poet" talked to me, especially the first letter, (it kinda went to another direction after that), I heard "Siddhartha" by Hesse is also a good one.

>If you get you political beliefs from a comedian, don't be surprised if they turn out to be a joke

People say dumb shit like this all the time. What are public schools supposed to teach that they're not? Students and parents have none of the blame for the incompetent man babies who file out of high school and now college?

ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/

Get undergraduate books on macroeconomics and microeconomics from the course syllabi, read them, and do the exercises.

You will be doing pretty much the same as an econ undergraduate.

They're teaching kids to memorize shit not learn things, and more importantly learn children how to behave in society. One example many bring up is (not) learning to do ones taxes.

>learn children how to behave in society.

Ah, public schooling in action.

Academia surely is a path. However anyone famous that interests me isn't because of their alma mater.

Pleb status detected. Out! Out! Out!

in finland, school is basically just a place where kids read books and write about/talk about what they read for 9 hours a day. for 16 years or however many years school is (until post-secondary). they have testing but it's extremely low-stakes. finnish students are considered among the best educated in the world.

i know a guy who is trying to become a scientist without going to university. he publishes theoretical science papers (as in he talks about 'what if' and 'maybe', and the history of certain ideas, rather than doing actual experiments which he doesn't have the education or equipment to do) about things like brain uploading, nanotechnology, etc to fringe transhumanist publications with open submission policies.

i don't know enough about what he's doing to know for sure if he's headed down the right path, or if he's just delusional and trying to impress people he went to high school with when he brings this stuff up at parties and brags about being published and meeting aubrey degrey once.

like if you're getting something published it's a good sign you're doing something right, right? or does it only really count for something if you publish to a major journal? at the very least it's portfolio building, right? i don't know anything about academia.

>like if you're getting something published it's a good sign you're doing something right, right?
Not really, no. It's very, very easy to publish junk, or (more commonly, in the west at least) to publish muddied papers that say nothing at all in an extremely obtuse, long-winded fashion.

Especially in, like you said, fringe journals, who are on the fringe for a reason; they have wacky opinions that aren't accepted by reputable mainstream journals.

Seriously, schools needs to stick to languages, literature, science, math, etc. Why the fuck do kids even have parents? Doing taxes, cooking, cleaning, socializing, sexual education, internet safety, anti-drug education, nutrition and even ass wiping should not be school things. Yeah, I might be wrong about some of that, but for fucks sake. Parents need to do something. Talk with your fucking kids.

I agree though. The educational system (in America anyways) is a complete joke. I went to a high school that was considered good, and we were like coloring and shit in English, which should have been write, read, write, write, read, read, discuss, read, write, and discuss some more. I felt like I learned shit in high school.

I am going to school for media, film, TV, and shit like that because telling people that I wanted to write for a living was a joke to be honest, but I discuss topics like science with people. Some people are confused about my field of study because I can somewhat hold my own in many different subjects. On a social or casual level, people respect me for this, but in a professional or academic level, I would imagine it not really working. So, yes and no.

You just might be a pseudo fagot, but if you really have knowledge about law, let me tell you something, I know a lot of law myself (from reading a lot about and personal cases I worked on myself) and every person that studied law will pull out the "You're wrong unless you studied law" card if they're wrong, it's incredible frustrating.

>brain uploading, nanotechnology
I mean, does he understand the quantum theory at at least an undergraduate level? Through serious textbooks or the equivalent?

> publishes theoretical science papers (as in he talks about 'what if' and 'maybe', and the history of certain ideas, rather than doing actual experiments
Sounds like he's some popsci pseud. Proper theoretical science is all about working with the formalism of the theory itself - attempting to find all the last minutia that a certain model predicts to see if you can explain a given experimental result with the theory or if you need to modify it, and making predictions not yet observed (the gravity waves thing, for instance, from the early days of GR) which experimentalists then try to observe to judge the theory.
An elementary example is the easily detectable paramagnetism of oxygen; intro courses in quantum chem usually do a mathematically rigorous treatment of how molecular orbital theory implies this (and valence bond theory itself does not.)
Of course it's not so dichotomous between theory and experiment. Relatively basic notions theoretically give you all the information you could ever gain from an arbitrary molecule, but in all but the very simplest cases the equations involved are far too pathological to work out by hand. Major simplifying assumptions have been used historically to get results, with corresponding loss in predictive power, but with the rapid improvement in computation speed and power these assumptions can be relaxed more and more. Determining how to go about this is a major area of computational chemistry, and can't be pigeonholed into "theory" or "experiment"

these guys managed

again i'm way out of my depth here (haven't studied science since high school), but based on what little i've read it's all either super super high level (i saw just one formula in all of his papers, a dependency ratio that described effectively nothing) or basically just ethics/advocacy.