My remark is not about the quality of college education. It's about his mindset.
You don't need a college education to read research articles, books and journals. But you certainly need an open mind and some discipline to not try to reinvent the wheel all the time. You need to learn about the state of the art in your field.
Some ideas and algorithms are proven and battle tested, and people should learn about them, before trying to create something new and claim it is much better than the old thing. This is very noticeable in some fields like cryptography.
His modus operandi certainly seems to be on the other extreme, everything old is bad and the new thing around the corner is going to change everything. Which causes a lot of people who believe him to collectively waste millions of hours of their time.
About your comments on the degree... it really depends on how you got it. For most people, I would agree with you. A small group of people in academia are insanely smart and are focused on research.
You don't need a college education to read research articles, books and journals. But you certainly need an open mind and some discipline to not try to reinvent the wheel all the time. You need to learn about the state of the art in your field.
Some ideas and algorithms are proven and battle tested, and people should learn about them, before trying to create something new and claim it is much better than the old thing. This is very noticeable in some fields like cryptography.
His modus operandi certainly seems to be on the other extreme, everything old is bad and the new thing around the corner is going to change everything. Which causes a lot of people who believe him to collectively waste millions of hours of their time.
About your comments on the degree... it really depends on how you got it. For most people, I would agree with you. A small group of people in academia are insanely smart and are focused on research.