Why do people go to class

Not to learn, certainly.

David Friedman says:

I have long been puzzled by why lecturers were not replaced by books shortly after the invention of printing made books cheap. Video is just the latest incarnation of that puzzle.

Well if you've been puzzled for long, why don't you think about it? Come on, Mr. Friedman. You're a smart guy. If you don't understand something, just think a bit harder. Or better still: think outside the box.

Some guys out there put theories about humans being wired to pay attention to lecturers, more than to books or videos. I don't know. Certainly didn't work like that for me. A boring lecture is a boring lecture whether on video or in person. I'm not the most patient guy so your mileage may vary but I surely didn't pay much attention myself to my professors unless they were particularly good.

The answer to the question is obvious. I mean, come on. People don't go to college to learn. They go because it's the official way of attaining high status. That's what education is for. The guy who just wants to learn already reads the book and doesn't bother with the lecture. The fact that we still have lectures and pay lecturers, as some guy said over there, "pay thousands of professors to give exactly the same Calculus lecture", is not to satisfy the market of kids who want to learn. That's not the market that high education caters for.

Robin Hanson made what I consider the best claim: education is about making friends with high prestige people. "Impressive people", as he put it. He would know, as he's quite impressive himself, and he appears to understand that a lot of people try to be friends with him even though they aren't at all interested in what he has to say. So for any average kid, a math professor is a high prestige guy. He's smart. He's impressive. Being in the same room with the guy means you have something of the social standing of that guy. You may not be impressive yourself, but you're good enough to be in the same room as an impressive guy.

You'll notice that's the same logic for why people follow celebrities all over the world. What's the freaking point in going batshit crazy over some singer, paying thousands and thousands of dollars? Why do people ask for autographs? Why do teenage girls go insane when some famous guy looked at them? Why the hell does every TV celebrity have millions of followers on Twitter? Because interaction is status. I have some connection with a high-status guy. Means I'm high status too. Sorta. It used to work like that in 100,000 BC. Not so much today in social media. But evolution is what it is. Gnon is lazy.

Boring Calculus lecture? Were the University merely serving up boring lectures in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Microbiology, would we be so worried about what the University is doing to our young people?

[…] Why do people go to class […]

Since everyone is now on the internet, even extremely poor third worlders, our entire education system is obsolete. We need to school kids to reading, writing, and rithmetic, but everything after that should be replaced by exams and apprenticeships. Just test all kids at the start of puberty, give them a grade, and then formal schooling just ends. Problem is that priesthood gets an extended education, largely for reasons of indoctrination rather than anything very useful, so if priests are high status, everyone gets an extended education.

I can think of two reasons to have professional instruction: (a) because when something doesn't work, you can just *ask* instead of spending hours trying to figure it out yourself, and (b) a teacher checking your work might notice gaps in your knowledge that you were completely unaware of. Really smart people can learn a lot on their own, but they learn even more when they work in close physical proximity to other really smart people. This "law of increasing returns" is why colleges were established in the first place. This breaks down if you try to impose a particular racial or sexual balance on the student body -- then the dumbest white or Asian male is vastly smarter than everyone who is not a white or Asian male. Do keep a pool of high-IQ white and Asian women nearby for breeding purposes, however, because single guys get tired of every social event being a sausage-fest!

There's plenty of ways to get a way to ask or get your work reviewed by an expert. That's what tutors are for. Having identical lectures done by the thousands is about the most stupid way of achieving the same thing. Which it really doesn't as most professors don't really answer questions nor give a shit about their students.

Sure, but not the same topic. The very fact that things like Math and Physics are taught in the same place as Genderqueer theory should tell you something about what college is all about.

Mastery of true intellectual disciplines really does take a long time. Took me 14 years to master philosophy and that's the only thing I'm not lazy about. The indoctrination is a parody of a real thing.

Regarding human nature, Friedman's head is so far in the clouds it's a private space program. He likes it there. Don't ruin it for him.

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

Lol. Man you're a better comedian than philosopher.

"People don’t go to college to learn. They go because it’s the official way of attaining high status." Again, this seems to be an upper-class perspective. For most people these days, getting a degree is about getting a decent job.

Lectures in the university remain because they are flexible and cheap means of delivering course content. I think lectures do have their place for those who want to learn, particularly in more theoretical subjects. I think they work best as supplements to reading materials and (if it applies to the subject) practical exercises, as starting points for further learning. Lectures, while having much lower information density than written materials, can be more engaging when done correctly, and I say this as an avowed bibliophile. Having said that, I agree with the main thrust of your argument, although I say it more broadly: people go to university for mostly economic and social reasons, not intellectual; finding their social betters to suck up to is just one reason out of many. This probably accounts for the high female:male ratios seen on modern Western campuses (hell, even in Iran that's true). I doubt the young 18 year old Psychology major is there because of a love of psychology or learning in general. She is there because (a) that's what society says you should do, (b) all her friends are doing it, so why shouldn't she? and (c) try and find some alphas to mate with, until she can find the one to permanently provide for her. I distinctly remember one girl, upon seeing this thick book that I was reading, admit that she didn't like to read. Another, complaining about her economics and sociology classes, wondered why shouldn't just find a rich guy to marry. I think guys of the same intelligence of those girls are more willing to not give a fuck about what society wants from them (although they care about what their bros think and are especially concerned with mating). Is this a good or bad thing? Well, the media will fret from time to time about this trend as a part of the "End of men" and whatnot. Economically, it may all come out a wash. True, many of old blue collar jobs are being abandoned or automated, but then we're coming to a point where so will many white collar jobs ... and at least those plebs didn't wasted their twenties pretending to care about gestalt theory, utility functions or Performance Studies (look at the Humanities PhD part - I don't think I've ever seen a more useless class).

"Decent job" is just a high status job. "status" doesn't mean psychological benefits as understood by decadent aristocrats , it does come with real perks.

it's about signaling by having the degree

But if the perks are almost entirely economic, calling it "status" only obscures the reality. Apparently about a third of the Australian workforce have university degrees. Since most degrees are actually functional, in the sense that they certify your competence to perform a particular economic function, that suggests that the people who grant degrees are economic gatekeepers, for about a third of all jobs. If we include the other forms of certification that are handed out by technical colleges, that fraction would be even higher. Education is an industry now. There are people making billions off it. Degrees are marketed to people as the difference between being on the bottom and being on the top of the economic heap. And being the middleman between a student and the qualification they seek, is how hundreds of thousands of people are earning a living. So while I certainly don't deny that there are non-economic factors at work throughout tertiary education, I have to think that economic factors - like the human need for money, or the division of labor required to make an information society work - are the primary determinants here.

That's a different topic. The question is why college works the way it does, if the point is to teach functional knowledge. There are much more effective ways of doing so. Like, say, learning on an actual job.

No, it's not about the degree. You can get a degree by from a distance university. Just read the books, send in your homework and pass the exams. You can get a Ph.D, J.D. or whatever without ever attending a class. The question really is why do universities offer classes? Part of the answer is probably tradition. Anyway, in my experience students very often do not attend classes. Some of those read the books instead. The others probaly shouldn't be enrolled.

In the Medieval period, no one had books. Everything was gotten by lecture and writing your own commonplace book. Later, when everyone had access to books, the lecture was supposed to be an example of a coherent piece of scholarship on the material in the readings. The lecture was designed for imitation, an intellectual model. The lecture was analogous to the the clinical part of a doctors education rather than the academic part. Then students stopped reading. No, really. Students don't read the material. Part of the reason is that the materials are so very bad. For example, college books for algebra and calculus are dreadful. Another part of the reason is the the intellectual level of students is much lower, and they have no interest in reading the material. If a rigorous geometry course (one that's all proofs) was required, how many students at a typical university could pass it? Very few. It's true that students don't go to university to learn. That's a good insight. They don't want to learn the material because well, they really can't. That's a more disturbing insight.

Most people aren't sociopathic status maximizers, but status lemmings. Why do people attend boring lectures? Because sociopathic status maximizers saw high status people getting a boost from college, and wanted to signal just how committed they were, and now everyone else gets to suffer instead of being able to call it a horse. India's caste system looks better and better by the day... (sorry if this double posts; I consider being able to use a smart phone proficiently to be extremely low status)

And the most disturbing insight is that it doesn't really matter.