16 ms·

Geez where do we get these stupid fallacies? >"There are some things that can't be self taught." Do books not matter anymore? The most brilliant ideas ever co

Geez where do we get these stupid fallacies? >"There are some things that can't be self taught." Do books not matter anymore? The most brilliant ideas ever conceived and implemented in society are written down. All information that goes into your head comes in as a concept in some form or another. If it can be conceptualized, it can be communicated (whether in a class, a book, or experienced through trial and error). What we're really saying is there are some concepts that self-taught programmers aren't discovering. Point them out and they'll find them (they're in books). School is awesome. I went. But don't believe the hype.

freshfunk 16y ago
To be fair, you should actually quote what I wrote which was: "Personally, I think the differences come at the top end. I think computer science students who've spent a lot of time doing research (particularly Ph.D.s) gain something that can't be self-taught." So, in this context, I think it makes sense. Yes, there will always be edge cases like Ramanujan (0.00001% of the population) but I took a little liberty not to qualify every single statement I made. If anything, this was more about giving respect to the <1% of people who have Ph.D's. But I guess you were offended.
- oniTony 16y ago
  But wouldn't a Ph.D., as in reading research papers and arriving at some unique new insight, be closer to "self-taught" than "taught existing knowledge from someone's lecture"?
  - kd0amg 16y ago
    If you insist on classifying into those two categories, sure, but when you bring up grad school, there's a lot more to formal education than sitting in lectures.
  - joshuaeckroth 16y ago
    As a PhD student myself, I've realized that working through the program is only half "reading research papers and arriving at some unique insight," which you could say is self-teaching. The other half is presenting your ideas to your advisor, peers, faculty, etc. and handling significant criticism. This occurs in higher-level classes, as well, in which the feedback from the prof. is a very important part of the experience. That, of course, is not "self-teaching," far from it. On a more general note, I think people should not make claims about what happens in situations (e.g. PhD programs) that one has not experienced herself. Claims like "whatever that person learned in college could have been learned outside college" is too often false simply because no one person can experience both sides of the debate.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - agentultra 16y ago
      To be fair, the life of a PhD student is pretty well documented. I don't think the first hand experience has much value except to the individual experiencing it. As to the value of a PhD; it's a social construct afaik. It's value is in the reputation you build which is vetted by other PhDs and organizations, your dissertations and debates, by the body of work you publish, and so on. Take all of that away and you're left with just the knowledge which is pretty much available to anyone with half a brain and a spark of curiosity. It's ludicrous to think that I should invest years of my life and more money than most people make in a year in order to learn how to develop an operating system. That knowledge is freely available and easily accessible. Computer vision? Check. Machine learning? Check. Statistics? Check. You don't go to university for a CS degree in order to learn how to program operating systems or figure out data structures. That would be an incredible waste of time and money. Someone who is self-taught is simply self-taught. They may have decided that they don't need the rigors of a formal education. Perhaps they don't care about publishing papers and defending them against critics. However, there's no way to say quantatively that a self-taught programmer is better or worse than a formally educated one. It's purely a value statement and one I find is loaded with a lot of FUD.
      - 16y ago
- freshfunk 16y ago
  @oniTony: For sure. I was thinking more along the lines of the time, effort and resources used in the pursuit of a Ph.D that make it unattainable for most people.
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y ago
  That's a very bold point to make and not feel the need to qualify, doubly so as it's core to your entire post.
- entangld 16y ago
  It wasn't fair, but I wasn't intentionally taking you out of context. I was kinda heated and paraphrasing from memory (not an accurate way of quoting). It's not specifically against you, but against an attitude many other people have. The people that believe that knowledge must be handed down to you by authorities. Sometimes those authorities are handing you someone else's logic and experience even though I could understand it on my own. I don't believe every idea/concept needs an interpreter. Apologies for the misquote.
  - freshfunk 16y ago
    Appreciate it and I understand. On the whole, I thought my post was pretty balanced. At the end I talk about how I'm looking for people to work with (cofounders / core team) and I care more about their ability to hack than which school they came from. I also said that people with degrees from good schools can become complacent and lazy because they always fall back on it whereas someone without a degree could be a better producer of good work.
kirbman89 16y ago
Books are good. That's how self-taught programmers learn.
- uxp 16y ago
  It's also how formally educated programmers learn. The ones that deny this just haven't realized exactly where their professors build their lectures, which is just a spoken book format in itself.
jcnnghm 16y ago
Some people actually believe it isn't possible to learn sufficiently complex things without instruction. I suspect this is because they themselves are unable, unwilling, or have not tried to learn without instruction. I had a professor that insisted I was cheating because I was able to get A's on projects and tests in a C course, but did not attend any classes or discussions. He insisted that it was absolutely impossible to learn C without taking a course and attending the lectures.
- tjr 16y ago
  I took a data structures class in which one of the students, due to work schedule or something, was unable to come to the lectures. She (the only woman in the class, by the way) got a better grade than the rest of us who sat through the lectures.
  - jk4930 16y ago
    I had a similar case in a programming class, too. We worked in teams of two, I wrote the programs for the weekly tests (they were required to write the exam), she had no idea about data types, she couldn't compile, she had no practical understanding of programming. When we wrote the exam, she passed well, I failed. :)
- nwmcsween 16y ago
  I believe you can learn whatever you wish, but depending on your field of study it's pretty hard procuring multimillion dollar machines used in some (chemistry, nuclear sciences, etc) sciences.
  - rch 16y ago
    Um.... http://aws.amazon.com/ http://aws.amazon.com/
    - jat850 16y ago
      AWS kicks ass, but it doesn't (yet) offer scanning-tunneling electron microscopes or particle accelerators to the best of my knowledge, which might be what grandparent was referring to?
gte910h 16y ago
Generally speaking, it's not that it's impossible someone who doesn't go to school will learn things, it is just less likely. I generally expect a greater degree of people who went to school (therefore COULD benefit from instruction) have a higher chance of foundational knowledge helpful in a computer based career. At the same time, I met dozens of nitwits while at school who can't code their way out of a paper bag and misunderstood half their classes. School increases their likelihood of being good, it doesn't guarantee it.
- entangld 16y ago
  The most difficult thing about self-teaching is where to start and what to read. If there were recipes for learning all major concepts in every discipline (currently working on this) self-teaching would be much faster and easier for everyone.
- freshfunk 16y ago
  Yeah, I alluded to this but didn't want to get into the thick of it. Degrees are like filters. I've done a lot of resume reading in my time, filtering through candidates for jobs. It's mindboggling how many responses one gets. Literally hundreds. And that wasn't my full time job (which was software development). At the point that you're looking at hundreds of responses, you start applying certain filters so that you can increase your probability of finding what you want. Typically the initial filter is something that doesn't require a lot of time. For many, this tends to be if they have a CS degree.
awj 16y ago
School is awesome in that it helps show you things you should know about, but otherwise wouldn't be aware of. So far as ignorance of a subject's existence prevents you from self-teaching, there are subjects that cannot be self taught.
MrVitaliy 16y ago
When you are self-learning from books, you only learn as fast as you personally can. With an instructor (if lucky, a good instructor) you learn same material, but much, much quicker due to how course program is laid out, experience of the instructor, etc. In the end, it's up to you and how you want to spend the time on this earth.

freshfunk 16y ago

To be fair, you should actually quote what I wrote which was: "Personally, I think the differences come at the top end. I think computer science students who've spent a lot of time doing research (particularly Ph.D.s) gain something that can't be self-taught." So, in this context, I think it makes sense. Yes, there will always be edge cases like Ramanujan (0.00001% of the population) but I took a little liberty not to qualify every single statement I made. If anything, this was more about giving respect to the <1% of people who have Ph.D's. But I guess you were offended.

oniTony 16y ago
But wouldn't a Ph.D., as in reading research papers and arriving at some unique new insight, be closer to "self-taught" than "taught existing knowledge from someone's lecture"?
- kd0amg 16y ago
  If you insist on classifying into those two categories, sure, but when you bring up grad school, there's a lot more to formal education than sitting in lectures.
- joshuaeckroth 16y ago
  As a PhD student myself, I've realized that working through the program is only half "reading research papers and arriving at some unique insight," which you could say is self-teaching. The other half is presenting your ideas to your advisor, peers, faculty, etc. and handling significant criticism. This occurs in higher-level classes, as well, in which the feedback from the prof. is a very important part of the experience. That, of course, is not "self-teaching," far from it. On a more general note, I think people should not make claims about what happens in situations (e.g. PhD programs) that one has not experienced herself. Claims like "whatever that person learned in college could have been learned outside college" is too often false simply because no one person can experience both sides of the debate.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - agentultra 16y ago
    To be fair, the life of a PhD student is pretty well documented. I don't think the first hand experience has much value except to the individual experiencing it. As to the value of a PhD; it's a social construct afaik. It's value is in the reputation you build which is vetted by other PhDs and organizations, your dissertations and debates, by the body of work you publish, and so on. Take all of that away and you're left with just the knowledge which is pretty much available to anyone with half a brain and a spark of curiosity. It's ludicrous to think that I should invest years of my life and more money than most people make in a year in order to learn how to develop an operating system. That knowledge is freely available and easily accessible. Computer vision? Check. Machine learning? Check. Statistics? Check. You don't go to university for a CS degree in order to learn how to program operating systems or figure out data structures. That would be an incredible waste of time and money. Someone who is self-taught is simply self-taught. They may have decided that they don't need the rigors of a formal education. Perhaps they don't care about publishing papers and defending them against critics. However, there's no way to say quantatively that a self-taught programmer is better or worse than a formally educated one. It's purely a value statement and one I find is loaded with a lot of FUD.
    - 16y ago
freshfunk 16y ago
@oniTony: For sure. I was thinking more along the lines of the time, effort and resources used in the pursuit of a Ph.D that make it unattainable for most people.
9ec4c12949a4f3 16y ago
That's a very bold point to make and not feel the need to qualify, doubly so as it's core to your entire post.
entangld 16y ago
It wasn't fair, but I wasn't intentionally taking you out of context. I was kinda heated and paraphrasing from memory (not an accurate way of quoting). It's not specifically against you, but against an attitude many other people have. The people that believe that knowledge must be handed down to you by authorities. Sometimes those authorities are handing you someone else's logic and experience even though I could understand it on my own. I don't believe every idea/concept needs an interpreter. Apologies for the misquote.
- freshfunk 16y ago
  Appreciate it and I understand. On the whole, I thought my post was pretty balanced. At the end I talk about how I'm looking for people to work with (cofounders / core team) and I care more about their ability to hack than which school they came from. I also said that people with degrees from good schools can become complacent and lazy because they always fall back on it whereas someone without a degree could be a better producer of good work.

kirbman89 16y ago

Books are good. That's how self-taught programmers learn.

uxp 16y ago
It's also how formally educated programmers learn. The ones that deny this just haven't realized exactly where their professors build their lectures, which is just a spoken book format in itself.

jcnnghm 16y ago

Some people actually believe it isn't possible to learn sufficiently complex things without instruction. I suspect this is because they themselves are unable, unwilling, or have not tried to learn without instruction. I had a professor that insisted I was cheating because I was able to get A's on projects and tests in a C course, but did not attend any classes or discussions. He insisted that it was absolutely impossible to learn C without taking a course and attending the lectures.

tjr 16y ago
I took a data structures class in which one of the students, due to work schedule or something, was unable to come to the lectures. She (the only woman in the class, by the way) got a better grade than the rest of us who sat through the lectures.
- jk4930 16y ago
  I had a similar case in a programming class, too. We worked in teams of two, I wrote the programs for the weekly tests (they were required to write the exam), she had no idea about data types, she couldn't compile, she had no practical understanding of programming. When we wrote the exam, she passed well, I failed. :)
nwmcsween 16y ago
I believe you can learn whatever you wish, but depending on your field of study it's pretty hard procuring multimillion dollar machines used in some (chemistry, nuclear sciences, etc) sciences.
- rch 16y ago
  Um.... http://aws.amazon.com/ http://aws.amazon.com/
  - jat850 16y ago
    AWS kicks ass, but it doesn't (yet) offer scanning-tunneling electron microscopes or particle accelerators to the best of my knowledge, which might be what grandparent was referring to?

gte910h 16y ago

Generally speaking, it's not that it's impossible someone who doesn't go to school will learn things, it is just less likely. I generally expect a greater degree of people who went to school (therefore COULD benefit from instruction) have a higher chance of foundational knowledge helpful in a computer based career. At the same time, I met dozens of nitwits while at school who can't code their way out of a paper bag and misunderstood half their classes. School increases their likelihood of being good, it doesn't guarantee it.

entangld 16y ago
The most difficult thing about self-teaching is where to start and what to read. If there were recipes for learning all major concepts in every discipline (currently working on this) self-teaching would be much faster and easier for everyone.
freshfunk 16y ago
Yeah, I alluded to this but didn't want to get into the thick of it. Degrees are like filters. I've done a lot of resume reading in my time, filtering through candidates for jobs. It's mindboggling how many responses one gets. Literally hundreds. And that wasn't my full time job (which was software development). At the point that you're looking at hundreds of responses, you start applying certain filters so that you can increase your probability of finding what you want. Typically the initial filter is something that doesn't require a lot of time. For many, this tends to be if they have a CS degree.

awj 16y ago

School is awesome in that it helps show you things you should know about, but otherwise wouldn't be aware of. So far as ignorance of a subject's existence prevents you from self-teaching, there are subjects that cannot be self taught.

MrVitaliy 16y ago

When you are self-learning from books, you only learn as fast as you personally can. With an instructor (if lucky, a good instructor) you learn same material, but much, much quicker due to how course program is laid out, experience of the instructor, etc. In the end, it's up to you and how you want to spend the time on this earth.