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It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of t

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they are actually making insightful comments. Without training most peoples’ capacity to understand why what they think they know is wrong when it is pointed out to them is quite low. The classroom is much better at transmitting how to think about a subject than reading a book or even watching a video lecture. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/08/13/how-does-virtual-learning-impact-students-in-higher-education/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...

makeitdouble 4y ago
You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc. Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem. I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough. Is that how you meant it? I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
  - t-3 4y ago
    How often does an economist ever receive feedback on their theories? AFAICT, only a handful of people make economic decisions at the scale of economic theory.
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      By "policy levers" I meant the sort that are available to a CFO or director of a mid-sized org, for example.
  - nasmorn 4y ago
    I am actually a trained economist and I would probably be dangerous if you gave me stacks of cash or access to policy levers. Economics is not like an actual hard science. And the very few things it knows are politically inconvenient and thus mostly ignored.
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      Fair enough. I suppose using the dismal science as the organizing anecdote in this particular conversation is a point I shouldn't cede :) Maybe something like accounting, corporate finance, or tax law makes for a more interesting conversation. But then, maybe that's also the point. I also wonder: how many people listen to endless audiobooks on macroeconomics or fiscal policy? How many people listen to endless audiobooks on tax law or corporate accounting? The CS equivalent might be the number of people who consume endless quantities of data science fluff content on today's-ChatGPT-stable-diffusion-DRL-etc. vs the number of people who spend the same amount of time watching videos on CUDA programming, data cleaning, how to design annotation projects, and so on.
Hermitian909 4y ago
> With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post. Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting that there's also a larger population of people who've achieved a bachelor's level of competence through study + work e.g. my experience is that it's not that rare for certain types of technicians to study to the level of an Electrical Engineering degree and no real effort is made to recognize that expertise.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Very common to see techs that are better in every way than new engineers but don’t get recognized as such
- syzarian 4y ago
  Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I misread what you wrote here. I thought your point was that the value of education was merely as a signal for knowledge rather than in the acquisition of knowledge. Rereading your post I see what you were getting at is the capturable value from an ed tech/ed business perspective. Sorry about the misreading.
rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago
In social science and humanities, I agree with you that self studying is an uphill battle. You'll just sound naive unless (1) you've made a herculean effort in studying, and (2) you've thought very critically on your own about how you will assimilate and where you will fit into the existing space of thought. There are no definitively correct opinions in these fields but plenty of influential people have theories. My experience is that it's all about how you convince others to join your "team", whether what you say is appropriate and within the Overton window, whose "side" are you on, etc. In some sense the thing that is "taught" is how to argue, what's acceptable to think, and who is on whose side or not. And the punishment for saying the "wrong" thing is more severe than in mathematized fields. Textbooks and/or (current) edtech are not going to be effective there. But in hard scientific topics (mathematics, algorithms, engineering) there are facts and ideas that are taught, and it's equally easy or hard to learn from prose as it is from listening. In my experience you can be very effective self-studying as long as you already have basic background about the field and what's the point. I skipped 2-3 years of math in school by simply reading the textbook over the summer, doing the exercises, and just asking to skip to the next class. You do this a few times and then you realize that in-person classes are also just them reading the textbook to you. I don't regret it whatsoever. I'd argue the difference is how mathematized a field is, probably along the same lines as SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1483460468-20170103.png https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1483460468-20170103.png
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- syzarian 4y ago
  I’ve taught mathematics for over 20 years in higher education and I strongly disagree with your view on the relative ease of learning math on one’s own. Let’s take a simple example. Here’s the distributive property for rings: a(b + c) = ab + ac It’s easy for me to convince someone that because of this property we get the following: 3(x + 2) = 3x + 6 It’s much harder to convince someone that 3x + 6 = 3(x + 2) It’s hard to convince someone that factoring is just using the distributive property reading right to left instead of left to right. It’s much harder to convince them of this just from reading it in a book. The nuance will be lost. They need examples that one goes over in a classroom to see this and a book can’t contain enough examples without being too many pages or without boring the reader with what appears to them to be minutia. They can’t grasp the nuance from reading. They grasp it from doing problems and being guided on the problems at the time they do them. Books and videos can not replace a teacher. Your experience is not the norm and you should not use it as a guide for what is realistically possible for most people.
lordnacho 4y ago
It's the same as you can get more fit by exercising and eating right on your own. All the material resources you need are there, but you need to add some personal behaviour to do it.
toss1 4y ago
>>Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. Yup. Plus, it's best suited for certain types of topics, and even then it's tough. My college had one intro-level Logic course in the Philosophy dept that was entirely self-study. Get the books, study, take a series of tests (limit 1/day), each one as many times as you liked until you passed and moved to the next test. Each test bumped you 1/3 grade (e.g., from C to C+), and you could in theory pass the whole course with an A+ in 21 days into the term, especially by studying ahead of the term. Reality was that hardly anyone actually ever did that, and this was a competitive Ivy League school. I took the course, prepped ahead, but still not to what I'd hoped, and it took me much longer than the 21 days to get the A+. It was actually a very good course and method of learning, but perhaps one of the things I learned best is that self-paced learning, especially in a rigorous sense, is far harder than it seems before we try it.

makeitdouble 4y ago

You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc. Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem. I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.

thwayunion 4y ago
> I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough. Is that how you meant it? I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
- t-3 4y ago
  How often does an economist ever receive feedback on their theories? AFAICT, only a handful of people make economic decisions at the scale of economic theory.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    By "policy levers" I meant the sort that are available to a CFO or director of a mid-sized org, for example.
- nasmorn 4y ago
  I am actually a trained economist and I would probably be dangerous if you gave me stacks of cash or access to policy levers. Economics is not like an actual hard science. And the very few things it knows are politically inconvenient and thus mostly ignored.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    Fair enough. I suppose using the dismal science as the organizing anecdote in this particular conversation is a point I shouldn't cede :) Maybe something like accounting, corporate finance, or tax law makes for a more interesting conversation. But then, maybe that's also the point. I also wonder: how many people listen to endless audiobooks on macroeconomics or fiscal policy? How many people listen to endless audiobooks on tax law or corporate accounting? The CS equivalent might be the number of people who consume endless quantities of data science fluff content on today's-ChatGPT-stable-diffusion-DRL-etc. vs the number of people who spend the same amount of time watching videos on CUDA programming, data cleaning, how to design annotation projects, and so on.

Hermitian909 4y ago

> With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post. Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting that there's also a larger population of people who've achieved a bachelor's level of competence through study + work e.g. my experience is that it's not that rare for certain types of technicians to study to the level of an Electrical Engineering degree and no real effort is made to recognize that expertise.

rdtwo 4y ago
Very common to see techs that are better in every way than new engineers but don’t get recognized as such
syzarian 4y ago
Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I misread what you wrote here. I thought your point was that the value of education was merely as a signal for knowledge rather than in the acquisition of knowledge. Rereading your post I see what you were getting at is the capturable value from an ed tech/ed business perspective. Sorry about the misreading.

rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago

In social science and humanities, I agree with you that self studying is an uphill battle. You'll just sound naive unless (1) you've made a herculean effort in studying, and (2) you've thought very critically on your own about how you will assimilate and where you will fit into the existing space of thought. There are no definitively correct opinions in these fields but plenty of influential people have theories. My experience is that it's all about how you convince others to join your "team", whether what you say is appropriate and within the Overton window, whose "side" are you on, etc. In some sense the thing that is "taught" is how to argue, what's acceptable to think, and who is on whose side or not. And the punishment for saying the "wrong" thing is more severe than in mathematized fields. Textbooks and/or (current) edtech are not going to be effective there. But in hard scientific topics (mathematics, algorithms, engineering) there are facts and ideas that are taught, and it's equally easy or hard to learn from prose as it is from listening. In my experience you can be very effective self-studying as long as you already have basic background about the field and what's the point. I skipped 2-3 years of math in school by simply reading the textbook over the summer, doing the exercises, and just asking to skip to the next class. You do this a few times and then you realize that in-person classes are also just them reading the textbook to you. I don't regret it whatsoever. I'd argue the difference is how mathematized a field is, probably along the same lines as SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1483460468-20170103.png https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1483460468-20170103.png

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
syzarian 4y ago
I’ve taught mathematics for over 20 years in higher education and I strongly disagree with your view on the relative ease of learning math on one’s own. Let’s take a simple example. Here’s the distributive property for rings: a(b + c) = ab + ac It’s easy for me to convince someone that because of this property we get the following: 3(x + 2) = 3x + 6 It’s much harder to convince someone that 3x + 6 = 3(x + 2) It’s hard to convince someone that factoring is just using the distributive property reading right to left instead of left to right. It’s much harder to convince them of this just from reading it in a book. The nuance will be lost. They need examples that one goes over in a classroom to see this and a book can’t contain enough examples without being too many pages or without boring the reader with what appears to them to be minutia. They can’t grasp the nuance from reading. They grasp it from doing problems and being guided on the problems at the time they do them. Books and videos can not replace a teacher. Your experience is not the norm and you should not use it as a guide for what is realistically possible for most people.

lordnacho 4y ago

It's the same as you can get more fit by exercising and eating right on your own. All the material resources you need are there, but you need to add some personal behaviour to do it.

toss1 4y ago

>>Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. Yup. Plus, it's best suited for certain types of topics, and even then it's tough. My college had one intro-level Logic course in the Philosophy dept that was entirely self-study. Get the books, study, take a series of tests (limit 1/day), each one as many times as you liked until you passed and moved to the next test. Each test bumped you 1/3 grade (e.g., from C to C+), and you could in theory pass the whole course with an A+ in 21 days into the term, especially by studying ahead of the term. Reality was that hardly anyone actually ever did that, and this was a competitive Ivy League school. I took the course, prepped ahead, but still not to what I'd hoped, and it took me much longer than the 21 days to get the A+. It was actually a very good course and method of learning, but perhaps one of the things I learned best is that self-paced learning, especially in a rigorous sense, is far harder than it seems before we try it.