11 ms·

There's a two edged sword here, both for the university student and the independent learner Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodo

by pacaro 4y ago

There's a two edged sword here, both for the university student and the independent learner Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues) For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thinkers For those without access to the structure, the risk is that they become cranks These aren't absolutes, but they are observable trends [Edit: are —> aren't]

hamburglar 4y ago
The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but the things only stay stored for a certain amount of time or based on some other criteria like how much space is available or how frequently they are fetched and—- and you cut in and say “so a cache.” I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.
- sitkack 4y ago
  Now we have LLMs which can name concepts by description! Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.
- ericd 4y ago
  I think reimplementing that stuff is probably a big part of why you felt they were so brilliant, though - once you've built your own way up the tech tree, you can see the whole tree, and move around it at will, drawing disparate parts into solving whatever problem you have right then.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch when it could have been pulled off the shelf wasted a lot of time debugging and running into mistakes that other people had already run into and solved. His brilliance meant we succeeded in spite of this stupid habit.
sitkack 4y ago
I think pre-U education should focus on didactics and metacognition, philosophy, logic and the scientific method. To really focus on the thinking behind the thinking, to never do it by accident. University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school. As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :) We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  You just end up kicking the can around the same problem. While college education being dumbed down is a typical topic, the exact same is earlier education - and also for the exact same reason. Here [1] is an 8th grade exam from 1912. Good luck! The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable. [1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    How dumb is your expected audience if that test required a "good luck!" It's like basic math....
    - bumby 4y ago
      >it’s like basic math Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties? I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.
inglor_cz 4y ago
The narrow thinkers / cranks dilemma is beautifully described, thank you. You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently. One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.
- Animats 4y ago
  > One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks. One word. Derrida. ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Speaking of blithering, you are only parroting some Internet tropes in an echo chamber (which is probably where you learned them). You know by now that such things are nonsense; they are a waste of time and a poison to knowledge and reason. And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days. What have you read recently?
    - Animats 4y ago
      > What have you read recently? "Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)
      - runlaszlorun 4y ago
        I’m going out on a limb here… but did they all tell you about how hard ‘hell week’ was?
wolverine876 4y ago
> Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities). Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.
- pacaro 4y ago
  So not only have I studied at a university (a canonically prestigious university FWIW), I have also had the good fortune to work closely with academics and researchers in my career. I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation. How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either) I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible. > I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own. Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.
klabb3 4y ago
As far as generalizations go, this is as good as it gets. Well put. To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different. As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?

by pacaro 4y ago

hamburglar 4y ago

The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but the things only stay stored for a certain amount of time or based on some other criteria like how much space is available or how frequently they are fetched and—- and you cut in and say “so a cache.” I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.

sitkack 4y ago
Now we have LLMs which can name concepts by description! Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.
ericd 4y ago
I think reimplementing that stuff is probably a big part of why you felt they were so brilliant, though - once you've built your own way up the tech tree, you can see the whole tree, and move around it at will, drawing disparate parts into solving whatever problem you have right then.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hamburglar 4y ago
  No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch when it could have been pulled off the shelf wasted a lot of time debugging and running into mistakes that other people had already run into and solved. His brilliance meant we succeeded in spite of this stupid habit.

sitkack 4y ago

I think pre-U education should focus on didactics and metacognition, philosophy, logic and the scientific method. To really focus on the thinking behind the thinking, to never do it by accident. University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school. As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :) We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.

somenameforme 4y ago
You just end up kicking the can around the same problem. While college education being dumbed down is a typical topic, the exact same is earlier education - and also for the exact same reason. Here [1] is an 8th grade exam from 1912. Good luck! The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable. [1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...
- pdntspa 4y ago
  How dumb is your expected audience if that test required a "good luck!" It's like basic math....
  - bumby 4y ago
    >it’s like basic math Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties? I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.

inglor_cz 4y ago

The narrow thinkers / cranks dilemma is beautifully described, thank you. You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently. One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.

Animats 4y ago
> One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks. One word. Derrida. ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Speaking of blithering, you are only parroting some Internet tropes in an echo chamber (which is probably where you learned them). You know by now that such things are nonsense; they are a waste of time and a poison to knowledge and reason. And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days. What have you read recently?
  - Animats 4y ago
    > What have you read recently? "Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)
    - runlaszlorun 4y ago
      I’m going out on a limb here… but did they all tell you about how hard ‘hell week’ was?

wolverine876 4y ago

> Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities). Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.

pacaro 4y ago
So not only have I studied at a university (a canonically prestigious university FWIW), I have also had the good fortune to work closely with academics and researchers in my career. I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation. How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either) I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible. > I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own. Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.

klabb3 4y ago

As far as generalizations go, this is as good as it gets. Well put. To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different. As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?