As a lover of literature and writing, I still have to admit SBF has a point here.
“By high school Sam [Bankman-Fried] had decided that he just didn’t like school, which was odd for a person who would finish at the top of his class. He’d also decided that at least some of the fault lay not with him but with school. English class, for instance . His doubts about English class dated back to the sixth grade. That was when the teachers had stopped worrying about simple literacy and turned their attention to deeper questions. ‘As soon as English class went from ‘can you read a book’ to writing an essay about a book, I completely lost interest,’ recalled Sam. He found literary criticism bizarre: who cared what you felt or thought about a story? The story was the story, with no provable right or wrong way to read it. ‘If they said to talk about what you like or don’t like, okay, I would do that,’ he said. That’s not what they were asking him to do, however. They were asking him to interpret the book, and then judging him on this interpretations… “
“‘I objected to the fundamental reality of the entire class,’ said Sam of English. ‘All of a sudden I was being told I was wrong––about a thing it was impossible to be wrong about. The thing that offended me is that it wasn’t honest with itself. It was subjectivity framed as objectivity. All the grading was arbitrary. I don’t even know how you grade it. I disagreed with the implicit factual claims behind the things that got good grades.'”
~Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
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