@squark @FarDraft The issue isn't that knowledge takes a lot of work to acquire, but that people are extremely skeptical of humanism nowadays. 54% of Republicans think colleges are harmful(!) and people complain about humanities departments. I took a philosophy class as an elective my first year and the only textbook was a 100-page summary of contemporary analytic philosophers with a few references to Plato and Descartes thrown in here and there. It kept explicitly saying things like "therefore, we can be certain God does not exist, there is no meaning to life, the brain is a computer, trees are actually invisible, and also we might live in a simulation that started on last Tuesday." I admire their willingness to put forth conclusions to arguments, but a full philosophy paper on any one of those topics would be at least 40 pages and less emotive about all the implications of what they've concluded, and would probably also completely toss out ideas like we can't see trees and probably live in a simulation that started last Tuesday. That's just schizophrenic, at least as long as you have no concrete reason to believe that and no way to falsify it. I could read that book in a couple of hours in one day and that's exactly what I did do. That's one semester of work. The idea that it takes so much time and work to learn anything at all is a joke. Some things are genuinely difficult but almost nothing is as difficult as most people make it out to be.

I think the connection between the contents of the book and the idea of how hard it is to be a philosopher, or mathematician (this is one of the easiest things to be an amateur at too, you don't need to buy any equipment or risk any sort of personal harm, though it's better to have mathematician friends to get special secret books with new problems and proofs in them passed around to you) or anything else should be pretty obvious. No one wants you to be any good at anything because people are bad and if people are good at things, the Devil is good at things basically, even if they don't believe in the Devil. Notice how moralistically everyone talks nowadays too, but it's all about avoiding things. My morality freaks them out because it tells you to avoid nothing if you have a good reason to do something and negative consequences are inevitable.