Universities: poisoning the well of knowledge

 

For full disclosure, I do have a university degree, but I’ve worked hard ever since to recover from it.

In my book, "Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading," the sentence that conveys the key insight I had during my apprenticeship was about discovery that the holy grail of market speculation is within: "this game was not so much about mastering the markets or statistics or even the charts as much as it was about mastering oneself. In speculation, markets are the external reality, but what decides the game's outcome is the inner process that determines one's actions."

Our actions depend on what we understand about that external reality and how we perceive changes. But the problem of how we know things goes beyond the domain of investment speculation - it is central to everything we do in life. The big word for this is epistemology - the "science" of how we know. It is one of the core mysteries of life which, the more we question it, the farther we drift away from the certitudes we embraced in our teenage years.

This is where one would expect our institutions of higher learning to lead the charge and provide us with the most accurate, best refined understanding of our world. Perhaps they do so on the margins, but in the mainstream, it seems that they ossify around dogmas which then become so entrenched that they are not even allowed to be questioned. Instead of true knowledge, they tend to produce groupthink, which can diverge so far from reality and common sense that at some point it becomes patently absurd.  (more...)

Universities: poisoning the well of knowledge