Conversation

One of the advantages of formal education over autodidact is that at some point 10-20 years later you realize you learned everything the wrong way, blame your teachers, and start to fix the damage. Self-taught people have no one else to blame but themselves, so they often don’t.
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Anything you self-learn has a slightly higher chance of being correct, but a much higher chance of going uncorrected if wrong. So net you end up wrong about a lot. If you’re lucky you build on more-right learnings.
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Autodidactic learning is best where the subject itself forces you into a strong trial and error learning loop, like an REPL. Otherwise the sense of rediscovery creates too much identity attachment to what you know.
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This is a real thing. Even the most trivial learning becomes an identity thing if you discover it for yourself instead of being guided or socratically nudged there. In other news Socratic method is nudging libertarian paternalism and should be viewed with hostile suspicions.
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also the topological structure of one's body of knowledge is completely different: the formal curriculum is legible to the extent that it is literally written down; the autodidact's learning process is associative and largely tacit
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