alt Hacker NewsI cannot imagine coming to a place that has a reputation of having higher educated people, and presenting that education is a waste of time. All research has some levels of agenda behind it, and it would be very easy to steer anything the author presents into a direction he wishes. On the contrary, literally every country on earth benefited greatly from education and the results are very visible in all aspects of human development (HDI, GDP, pollution, literacy, etc...), most recently China, and even more recently India. Both had huge numbers of illiterate people, compared to both advancing at an incredible pace when a large emphasis was put on education.
My reading of it is not that Bryan thinks education (aka learning) is a waste of time, but that much of what we call 'education' in the US, particularly with respect to higher education (4 year colleges) is just signaling. Very little is being learned. It's just a very expensive and time-consuming way to sort people based on skills and attributes they already had.
Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accurate. It's based on my impression of a book I read a couple of years ago, polluted with my own biases, other things I've read on the topic etc.