Would you sell your education?

[Chris11]

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

 

[Hadoblado]

I would for a very high number. At least in the multiple hundreds of thousands, more likely in the millions.

Education is a lot of work, and it takes up years of your life. It would basically have to make up for the wages I didn't earn while getting the education, plus extra for the pretty intense stress such an education would cause me compared to a similar amount of work.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

Definitely not. You're basically selling a part of who you are, in fact the most valuable part of who you are in my opinion, as this is a part of your intellectual self. I wouldn't trade that for money.

 

[Black Rose]

I think I would like to keep everything I learned in high school. Wouldn't sell it.

 

[Happy]

Fuck it. I’m over it. I’ll sell it for $10mil ($1m for each bachelors and $2m for my masters, and $6m for my industry experience) and start over in tech. Any takers?

 

[Ex-User (8886)]

Fuck money, I take knowledge.

 

[Minuend]

If I for some reason couldn't get an income and was completely broke, then I'd probably sell it. But it would have to be enough money to survive for a while, or enabling me to get an income.

As long as I have a comfy income, I wouldn't do it. Unless, maybe if the degree was garbage to me anyway

 

[Hadoblado]

Wait... would this include high-school? Would I become completely uneducated or just minimally educated? I was interpreting the question as selling your non-compulsory education.

 

[Black Rose]

The question asks me to sell my education.
But I only got a high school diploma.
The average years for a P.h.D is 12 years.
No money for Animekitty unfortunately.

 

[DoIMustHaveAnUsername?]

Depends on the subject of PhD. But regardless I probably won't sell, unless I have some heavy financial necessity.

 

[The Gopher]

I'm more interested in governments buying up educations and stacking them on young people/themselves in order to have the most effective strategists. This entire idea could become a war dystopian anime. Where people are no longer given the option to sell and have to hide their knowledge while trying to gain enough/use the machine themselves to gain the knowledge in order to fight back against the governments.

You could do the whole deathnote thing were there's a mastermind for the resistance who nobody knows etc. *Also if any of you make money off this idea I'll sell you my education for it.

 

[Pyropyro]

No, that's stupid. Why sell something that regularly earns $$$ for one time big time windfall? I don't think I have the financial maturity to handle that large amount of money wisely.

It's like killing the golden goose.

 

[Hadoblado]

When you state it like that it feels like you're not thinking of it at all quantitatively?

The cheque is blank. You could sell your education for enough money to set yourself up for life AND everyone else in your country. TBH at a certain level saying no is a selfish act because you could literally cure world poverty or whatever else with that money.

You could pay for the very best education, you could pay for personal tutors to get you a better education than you previously had. The time it takes to get a new education should be valued against the time saved not having to work. Ten years to get another PhD or whatever should be valued against the 30+ years you're looking at having to work full time.

You could save the world at almost no cost to yourself.

Opposition to selling education seems ideological in nature and short-sighted. Bugger off hippies!

 

[Pyropyro]

When you state it like that it feels like you're not thinking of it at all quantitatively?

The cheque is blank. You could sell your education for enough money to set yourself up for life AND everyone else in your country. TBH at a certain level saying no is a selfish act because you could literally cure world poverty or whatever else with that money.

You could pay for the very best education, you could pay for personal tutors to get you a better education than you previously had. The time it takes to get a new education should be valued against the time saved not having to work. Ten years to get another PhD or whatever should be valued against the 30+ years you're looking at having to work full time.

You could save the world at almost no cost to yourself.

Opposition to selling education seems ideological in nature and short-sighted. Bugger off hippies!

The problem is that it posits that there's a blank cheque and that the gov't or whatever entity is buying your knowledge won't try to shortchange you. PhD's have different values and the initial financial investment doesn't necessarily mean that the PhD is actually valuable (if this is not real then there should be no PhD grads on food stamps).

You could just start a business IRL & save the world rather than go this PhD selling route. Less risk.

 

[Hadoblado]

the question is this:

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

It's a hypothetical and the cheque is blank. When you assume practical limitations, you're avoiding the question.

 

[Pyropyro]

the question is this:


It's a hypothetical and the cheque is blank. When you assume practical limitations, you're avoiding the question.

Well if it's a hypothetical blank cheque then cash away! The higher the better.

 

[HDINTP]

No. Ph.D. is interest driven and I would not want to start all over again when older...

 

[VexedSage]

I would not sell mine.

"If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability."
~Henry Ford

Additionally, money can be taken from you. The other, not so much.

 

[Reluctantly]

Money is a game. If you know what to do with it, you can make more. Heck, most businesses operate on debt. But their ROI is high enough that investors don't mind that. Debt can be a good thing in terms of business.

That said, as much as I love knowledge and the ability to do and know about almost anything, I would rather have lots of passive income and learn and do things on my own terms. Because a degree generally gets someone a job at a corporation and a very negative debt that you can't even declare bankruptcy on. So if you don't get a decent job to pay off those student loans, you are kind of screwed. But having passive income usually means being an entrepreneur and having more opportunity for getting involved in many kinds of business or just having fun with knowledge or learning things in a natural way that's on your terms and isn't all about grades, loans, grad school, and eventually getting a high paying job at a corporation...

 

[Reluctantly]

So I'd take the cash...

At least a half million would be fine.

 

[Black Rose]

If my IQ was high enough to get a P.h.D (12 years of education) I would not sell it.
If you had an IQ of 130 and sold 12 points making you 118 it would not be worth it.
But that is the case that I got a math computer science degree.
If your good at computers and math you would lose those skills.
You would get dumber. Imagine not knowing addition and subtraction.

Now if I could buy 12 IQ points that would be awesome but not for the person selling them. Same in education.

 

[QuickTwist]

I have a bit of knowledge I learned about circuits and shit when I was at ITT tech. It did end up costing me a bit of money and I am in debt because of it, but would I trade what I learned for no more bills irt School? Probably not even though I hardly ever have any practical reason to know how a Wheatstone Bridge works, but knowledge is power and what you learn tends to have ripple effects that change the course or direction of your life. Would not trade that because there's no guarantee I would be in any better position than I am now.

 

[Bertrand Russell's Barber]

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

Would I see the degree? In a heartbeat. The knowledge? Nope.

In my case, the stuff I learned for my degree gives me meaning and purpose in life. Without it I don't know what I'd do. Maybe sit and home and read books all day.
How depressing.

 

[Chris11]

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

Would I see the degree? In a heartbeat. The knowledge? Nope.

In my case, the stuff I learned for my degree gives me meaning and purpose in life. Without it I don't know what I'd do. Maybe sit and home and read books all day.
How depressing.

Do you actually do motivic cohomology!? I'm working in invariant theory.

 

[Ex-User (13503)]

If it’s only academic knowledge, I’d absolutely sell, and for cheap. Maybe, idk, twice what it cost me. It seems like sellers are unhappy with their current circumstances and want to start over. That’s not me though. One factor is that learning is a lifelong process. Another is that academic knowledge is no substitute for truth.

You're basically selling a part of who you are, in fact the most valuable part of who you are in my opinion, as this is a part of your intellectual self.

There are problems in defining the self by knowledge and dedicating yourself to the pursuit of truth, like what happens when you actually find the truth.

If you’re open, you will find it. And when you do you’ll experience the strongest existential dread and despair you’ve ever known. The chase is over. You’ll have to mourn the loss of the very core of your identity, at which point, if you survive it, you’ll either form a new, authentic identity that reflects this truth, or go insane. The psychotic, destructive kind of insane, not the Neitzsche kind. The alternative is pathological denial of the truth.

 

[Bertrand Russell's Barber]

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

Would I see the degree? In a heartbeat. The knowledge? Nope.

In my case, the stuff I learned for my degree gives me meaning and purpose in life. Without it I don't know what I'd do. Maybe sit and home and read books all day.
How depressing.

Do you actually do motivic cohomology!? I'm working in invariant theory.

Ahahaha. I wish. I had this prof in school who was trained as a mathematician (although his formal work these days is applying algebraic geometry to machine learning problems) and he knew I liked math and wanted to explore further and so we had long chats about different areas of math but almost always coming back to algebraic geometry because that was his first love in a sense.

So one day I was asking him about whether there is an lebesque integral equivalent for functional spaces and he told me about this field called motivic integration and motivic cohomology and basically I converted to the algebro - geometry school of thought.

It was just really a whole new way of looking at math.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, my forays these days are of a tamer and more pragmatic nature although I do wish to go back to studying math in my free time after finishing up my degree.

 

[Chris11]

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

Would I see the degree? In a heartbeat. The knowledge? Nope.

In my case, the stuff I learned for my degree gives me meaning and purpose in life. Without it I don't know what I'd do. Maybe sit and home and read books all day.
How depressing.

Do you actually do motivic cohomology!? I'm working in invariant theory.

Ahahaha. I wish. I had this prof in school who was trained as a mathematician (although his formal work these days is applying algebraic geometry to machine learning problems) and he knew I liked math and wanted to explore further and so we had long chats about different areas of math but almost always coming back to algebraic geometry because that was his first love in a sense.

So one day I was asking him about whether there is an lebesque integral equivalent for functional spaces and he told me about this field called motivic integration and motivic cohomology and basically I converted to the algebro - geometry school of thought.

It was just really a whole new way of looking at math.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, my forays these days are of a tamer and more pragmatic nature although I do wish to go back to studying math in my free time after finishing up my degree.

That sounds like a very interesting application! Do you have any papers to recommend in the area?

 

[Bertrand Russell's Barber]

suppose that you have just graduated with a PhD. Imagine that you could sell the degree and knowledge, deleting it all from your memory save for the knowledge that you once had it, and copying it to someone else’s brain. Would you sell? How much would it take?

Would I see the degree? In a heartbeat. The knowledge? Nope.

In my case, the stuff I learned for my degree gives me meaning and purpose in life. Without it I don't know what I'd do. Maybe sit and home and read books all day.
How depressing.

Do you actually do motivic cohomology!? I'm working in invariant theory.

Ahahaha. I wish. I had this prof in school who was trained as a mathematician (although his formal work these days is applying algebraic geometry to machine learning problems) and he knew I liked math and wanted to explore further and so we had long chats about different areas of math but almost always coming back to algebraic geometry because that was his first love in a sense.

So one day I was asking him about whether there is an lebesque integral equivalent for functional spaces and he told me about this field called motivic integration and motivic cohomology and basically I converted to the algebro - geometry school of thought.

It was just really a whole new way of looking at math.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, my forays these days are of a tamer and more pragmatic nature although I do wish to go back to studying math in my free time after finishing up my degree.

That sounds like a very interesting application! Do you have any papers to recommend in the area?

Hey there!

I am linking to my Professor's page on Singular Learning. Lots of resources on that page. Enjoy!