It’s simply wrong to say that self-directed improvement doesn’t work. Many people make lots of progress with self-reflection, reading, intentional practice, etc.
It would be equally correct (and equally misleading) to say “classes don’t work”. Personally, I dropped out of college after 2 years because I just wasn’t getting enough from the structured, semi-useful coursework. There’s LOTS of studies that show extremely weak correlation between class time (at reasonable margins, correcting for other factors) and later achievement.
Presumably, the best for any individual is some idiosyncratic mix of the two. In fact, it takes a fair bit of self-reflection and desire for improvement to identify the classes and groups which will help your goals, so there’s no escaping that level.
It would be accurate to say that self-directed improvement has a lot of failure modes that are hard to recognize from the inside—human biases and all. Working with others in a shared environment with scientific ground rules ensures that your biases and their biases form a non intersecting set and you’re left with the truth.
I work in open source and it is very often the case that someone new comes to the project with a gigantic, unreviewable pile of changes that they want merged. Almost inevitably, it is 90% bad changes on top of 10% of innovation, and the bad came about because they didn’t understand what they were changing or the reason for its existence. The 10% is good but they’ve got to go back and extract it out which is a long and protracted process. Much better to have been involved in the community from the beginning, where they would have had things they wouldn’t have thought of themselves pointed out and learned bits that they wouldn’t have thought relevant, but are.
Yeah, I agree that schools often have too much coursework. I think it’s still worth it because you get a wider view of the field (and I didn’t drop out), but YMMV.
It’s simply wrong to say that self-directed improvement doesn’t work. Many people make lots of progress with self-reflection, reading, intentional practice, etc.
It would be equally correct (and equally misleading) to say “classes don’t work”. Personally, I dropped out of college after 2 years because I just wasn’t getting enough from the structured, semi-useful coursework. There’s LOTS of studies that show extremely weak correlation between class time (at reasonable margins, correcting for other factors) and later achievement.
Presumably, the best for any individual is some idiosyncratic mix of the two. In fact, it takes a fair bit of self-reflection and desire for improvement to identify the classes and groups which will help your goals, so there’s no escaping that level.
It would be accurate to say that self-directed improvement has a lot of failure modes that are hard to recognize from the inside—human biases and all. Working with others in a shared environment with scientific ground rules ensures that your biases and their biases form a non intersecting set and you’re left with the truth.
I work in open source and it is very often the case that someone new comes to the project with a gigantic, unreviewable pile of changes that they want merged. Almost inevitably, it is 90% bad changes on top of 10% of innovation, and the bad came about because they didn’t understand what they were changing or the reason for its existence. The 10% is good but they’ve got to go back and extract it out which is a long and protracted process. Much better to have been involved in the community from the beginning, where they would have had things they wouldn’t have thought of themselves pointed out and learned bits that they wouldn’t have thought relevant, but are.
I liked your first point but come on here.
How is that not the point of peer review, whether formal or informal?
Yeah, I agree that schools often have too much coursework. I think it’s still worth it because you get a wider view of the field (and I didn’t drop out), but YMMV.