How can I measure my aptitude for various fields (for cheap/free)? (I did an undergrad degree in education which was so easy I don’t know if I could make the grades in a demanding field).
Get a textbook of the appropriate level on the subject that has exercises and the correct answers to them, read the book, then do the exercises and see what you come up with? If it’s math or physics, you should be able to tell by yourself whether your solutions resemble the example solutions in the text, seem to make sense and come up with the correct answers.
I don’t know how well this will work with evolutionary biology or cognitive science. If you want to include philosophy in the “mind” part, it’s my understanding that you need to be a trained academic philosopher to reliably tell fancy garbage and acceptable academic philosophy apart, so the approach probably won’t work there.
After reading a couple of introductory textbooks, try to find grad students in the field in online chats and ask them about the stuff to gauge how well you’ve understood it. You can probably find plenty of math and computer science literate people on Lesswrong to bounce stuff off of.
Also, do you actually know you need to attend lectures to learn things, or are you just planning to do this because attending lectures is what people who get educated are supposed to do in the standard narrative? I’m pretty much incapable of following spoken academic lectures myself, and basically learn most everything by reading. If I wanted to get an education, I’d just go for a big stack of textbooks and a good note-taking system and ignore live lectures entirely at least on the undergrad level.
If you want to include philosophy in the “mind” part, it’s my understanding that you need to be a trained academic philosopher to reliably tell fancy garbage and acceptable academic philosophy apart, so the approach probably won’t work there.
My understanding is that there is considerable overlap between these two categories.
That’s another problem. You might not be able to trust an academic philosopher’s judgment on whether a bit of philosophy is actually any good as much as, say, an academic mathematician’s judgment on whether a bit of mathematics is any good.
Get a textbook of the appropriate level on the subject that has exercises and the correct answers to them, read the book, then do the exercises and see what you come up with? If it’s math or physics, you should be able to tell by yourself whether your solutions resemble the example solutions in the text, seem to make sense and come up with the correct answers.
I don’t know how well this will work with evolutionary biology or cognitive science. If you want to include philosophy in the “mind” part, it’s my understanding that you need to be a trained academic philosopher to reliably tell fancy garbage and acceptable academic philosophy apart, so the approach probably won’t work there.
After reading a couple of introductory textbooks, try to find grad students in the field in online chats and ask them about the stuff to gauge how well you’ve understood it. You can probably find plenty of math and computer science literate people on Lesswrong to bounce stuff off of.
Also, do you actually know you need to attend lectures to learn things, or are you just planning to do this because attending lectures is what people who get educated are supposed to do in the standard narrative? I’m pretty much incapable of following spoken academic lectures myself, and basically learn most everything by reading. If I wanted to get an education, I’d just go for a big stack of textbooks and a good note-taking system and ignore live lectures entirely at least on the undergrad level.
My understanding is that there is considerable overlap between these two categories.
That’s another problem. You might not be able to trust an academic philosopher’s judgment on whether a bit of philosophy is actually any good as much as, say, an academic mathematician’s judgment on whether a bit of mathematics is any good.