I suffered through a computer science degree. I didn't make much progress figuring things out after the first year (on account of my head injury [0]). My father values my degree more than I do.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17734058
When I was finishing up my first year at teh university, I thought I was wasting my time. Pops said, "just get your degree, then you can do what you want." That piece of paper was rather expensive. Later I came to appreciate that college is mostly about signaling.
Quotes from your link:
> Men by and large compete to be selected by women, but my anecdotal observation is that relatively few women perceive this because they’re in turn focused on a relatively small number of high-status men, with status defined differently in different context.
I had to explain this to a passenger one night [1]. She'd remembered me from the time I'd almost taken her somewhere, maybe two months before...
[1] https://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys...
> Why would a high-status, high-skill man want to marry a random woman with limited skills or prospects?
I have notes for a followup to my blog post, tentatively titled "the predicaments of girls and boys". One of my passengers told of a woman who'd snagged herself a "high-status man". After four years she got kicked to the curb. I suspect she was attempting to upgrade herself from 'trophy girlfriend' to 'trophy wife', but her high-status boyfriend probably thought that was beyond the scope of their arrangement.
For me, my computer science program in college was finally a place to get answers and move on when I did encounter that one stumbling block.
Even if I could learn 99% of whatever material I was interested in from reading things online, I'd inevitably spend at least that much time struggling with something I didn't get that really held me up.
For example. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why, a computer program wouldn't know at compile time how much memory its data structures would use. So while I could read about malloc, I just didn't get the use case (as dumb as that sounds). As you can imagine, asking someone who knows what they're doing leads to a real quick "ah ha, of course" moment.
This was in 2001 before stackoverflow existed, and it felt like I was living in a bubble. Maybe things are different today. If I were learning from scratch now, I'm sure I could have learned the answer to that question and much more on my own.
But I have to think that I would have just entered college a little bit further, stuck on slightly harder questions.
To say nothing of the things school made me do that I wouldn't have done on my own, like learn how a compiler works, or take a database course. Two things I feel are paying dividends to this day.