To be fair I don't think I have ever seen in my entire life someone worth talking about art, history, philosophy and so on without at least a bachelor's degree. It's not that you need to be particularly smart to get a bachelor, it's just that the bar is so low that if you don't have one it's very likely you really are just subhuman or below average intelligence. Even if the degree is completely unrelated or banal.
As per academia? The main problem si that there are way too many old people. Once someone is over the age of 40 they don't change their worldview anymore and will keep on trying to prove themselves through sophistry, this is even worst outside of humanities where researchers can't just come out and say "well uhhh my idea didn't work and my thesis wasn't really proven" after being given a couple thousands to millions of dollars on their pet astronomy project.
The absolute seething in this thread from OP just saying "hey maybe some asshat who did the bare minimun and read a couple books and works, wrote a shwaty little thesis and so on is probably better than some blue collar young adult insisting he knows a lot about history and philosophy from youtubers, podcasts and twitter influencers" just proves that maybe /lit/ ain't so smart after all. Some things are the status quo because they are obvious to anyone: Yeah academics kinda center their whole career around studying a specific subject so they probably know better than you. This whole thread just reeks of "didn't attend college or dropped out" because some of the things people are claiming here like >>24703877 just straight the fuck up never happen.
I don't even like universities that much and I think a master's degree is already pushing it if you want to find a practical use for your degree beyond studying your hyperfixation a hell of a lot, because yeah a lot of academic thesis specially in history and literature center around just that.
