The energetic disgruntled thinkers are building their own RAG/LLM systems to operate retrieval index services for their home-server data hoards. And then we have the heroic figures, like Alexandra Elbakyan, and those heroes will one day be remembered like the monks of Lindisfarne (875 A.D.) or the Buddhist monks who concealed the Mogao Caves (1000 A.D.).

We may be on the brink of a new Dark Age. Let us hope we have enough monks to save some of the knowledge.

In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?

Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,” and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer people, as a percentage, are auditing classes.

My father really enjoyed college, in fact he used to audit classes frequently in the 1970′s and 80′s and kinda just collected credits at a certain point. When I asked why he would ever do that he looked incredulous and responded, “Because I like learning new things, and it helped direct me towards what books to get out of the library when I found something interesting.” Of course he also went to school during a time where he could work minimum wage and pay for his college education out of pocket, but it put in perspective how radically the internet has effected our methods of gathering information. Getting in my car and driving to a certain location, at a certain time, to hear a guy talk so I can ask questions afterward seems so massively inefficient it would hardly occur to me.

No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.