This is one of my favorite scenes from Waking Life, which I highly recommend. The part I'm interested in is the young men walking down the street, propounding upon notions of perhaps dubious value that they picked up somewhere. They've obviously spent way too many years in college. They can't know what's true or false because they've never tested it.
I'm not knocking higher learning. I went to college once --for a year. I went to Clarkson University --a very respectable poor-man's MIT-- to study Physics. My first semester, I asked my professor how I might go about learning to make a machine to teleport matter from one location to another. He just laughed in my face. An involuntary bark of laughter escaped his mouth. He told me that I had been watching too much Star Trek.
Of course, twenty-five years later, we're teleporting matter now --just as I expected we would be. (Or, more precisely, we are teleporting from one location to another the information attached to subatomic particles. Six of one, half a dozen of another.)
So I knew that my time and money at that school would be wasted. Why spend my time listening to a man imply that his knowledge was so vast that it circumscribed all permissible behavior of the universe? I have never heard of that. Ergo, that does not exist.
But the point here is that these guys are, as they say, all theory and no action. They'll talk for the rest of their lives without actually doing anything. The old man who has seen fit to climb the pole is all action and no theory. He'll always be doing something, but who knows if it's worth anything.
So the goal, as seems to be implied by the film, is to strike a balance between the two. I am not sure that one can attain an ideal level of knowledge before acting, or if it would even be desirable; you would likely die of old age before you reached some ideal level of knowledge.
Action and theory are like two men running alongside one another with their inside legs tied together: unattractive, clumsy, and silly --but probably the best compromise.
