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> the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks. Categorization of most autodidacts as useless cranks is a bit extreme. Perhaps you didn't read through
by daveguy 10y ago
> the overwhelming majority of them are useless cranks.
Categorization of most autodidacts as useless cranks is a bit extreme. Perhaps you didn't read through to the last paragraph of the article:
"I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin..."
- Analemma_ 10y agoBy "useless" I meant, "at present, has nothing to contribute that advances the field" (which I think is indisputably true) rather than "useless to society". Admittedly a different word would probably have made this clearer and less emotionally polarizing.
- daveguy 10y agoThank you for the clarification! That is an accurate description of a typical autodidact's relationship to the field of interest (not currently contributing). Maybe that is the huge difference between autodidacts in physics (and mathematics and other hard sciences) and autodidacts in programming. You don't have to advance the field of computer science to be productive as a programmer.