I suspect this may actually be the most important thing the educational system does.
You can learn from books or online videos. You can find fellow learners on social networks. You can find motivation… at random places.
But without being shown a direction, you will probably get lost in a sea of nonsense. A simple advice, such as “chemistry is the thing you should study, not alchemy” can save you decades of time you might otherwise waste learning useless things.
It is easy to notice the damage school system does, and easy to take its benefits for granted. Even if you are homeschooled, you are still exposed to people who got the right directions. (People from crazy religious families may be prevented from getting the right direction in e.g. biology or sex education, but they will still probably get the right directions about math or chemistry or geography.) This did not happen spontaneously. It was the educational system that redirected billions of people from thinking about superstitions and magic and astrology and homeopathy and whatever else, towards thinking about math and physics and chemistry and geography and history. Even if for many people the success is only partial, the fact that they even know about the useful stuff means a lot.
In today’s world, you can become good at math without spending a single day at school. But in a world where everyone in the last three generations was an autodidact, you most likely wouldn’t be good at math, because you most likely wouldn’t even know that there was such a thing as math. (Unless you would be lucky to be born in a family of mathematicians.) Instead you would spend your time learning… some nonsense. Some difficult nonsense that requires high IQ and lot of studying to get it impressively right. Just like Newton spent half of his life doing astrology.
Autodidacts are easily recognized by their unknown unknowns. They may know a lot, but what they don’t know, they usually don’t even know that it exists.
The thing is, I’ve noticed that a lot of the curriculum in schools is blind imitation of high-status science-y people, which can end up as cargo culting. Textbooks and classes have students memorize terms for certain things because “smart people know those words, and we should make kids be more like the smart people”—but they use those words because they understand underlying concepts, and without that the words can be useless.
Now that we have the internet, you can simply see what kinds of technical language experts use and learn about those terms yourself. The distinctions “autodidact” is supposed to imply might have been weakened by the internet, and for that matter by libraries.
Of course, you’d also have to pick the experts you’re going to imitate on your own, but then, you also have to pick professors or schools or textbooks. Following a societal consensus about competence should work about equally well either way.
Autodidacts are easily recognized by their unknown unknowns. They may know a lot, but what they don’t know, they usually don’t even know that it exists.
I remember talking with a director of a Max Planck institute. Ion transport was relevant to the conversation, and I said something about how “of course, while lithium ions are light, that doesn’t mean they diffuse quickly because they’re strongly bound to their solute complex, more than sodium ions”. He said, “Aha, I see you’re well-educated”. I thought that was funny because that wasn’t something I ever took any classes on or got mentoring about. The other funny thing about that conversation was that his pet project was this energy storage idea that had no chance of working because he didn’t understand ion solvation well enough.
I think we probably agree on how far the existing system is from the ideal. I wanted to point at the opposite end of the scale as a reminder that we are even further away from that.
When I was at the first grade of elementary school, they tried to teach us about “sets”, which mostly meant that instead of “two plus two equals four” the textbook said “the union of a set containing two elements and another set containing two elements, has four elements”. In hindsight I see this was a cargo-cultish version of set theory, which probably was very high-status at that time. I also see that from the perspective of set theory as the set theorists know it, this was quite useless. Yes, we used the word “set” a lot, but it had little in common with how the set theorists think about sets. Anyway, we have learned addition and subtraction successfully, albeit with some extra verbal friction.
Compared to that, when I tried to learn something in my free time as a teenager, people around me recommended me to read books written by Däniken, the Silva method of mind control, Moody’s Life after Life, religious literature, books on meditation, and other shit. I have spent a lot of time practicing “altered states of consciousness”, because (from the perspective of a naive teenager who believed that the adults around him are not utter retards, and the people they consider high-status are not all lying scumbags) it seemed like a very efficient intervention. I mean, if you get the supernatural skills first, they will give you a huge multiplier to everything you try doing later, right? Haha, nope.
So while I hate school with a passion, as many people on Less Wrong do, the alternative seems much worse. Even the books I study in my free time now were often written in the context of the educational system, or by the people employed by the educational system.
I don’t trust societal consensus at all. Look at the YouTube videos about quantum physics, 99% of them is some crap like “quantum physics means that human mind had a mystical power over matter”. Even if you limit yourself to seemingly smart people, half of them believe that IQ isn’t real because Nassim fucking Taleb said so. Half of the popular science does not replicate.
I think you’re comparing apples to oranges here. When people get into topics where they have no personal contact with reality, you should be comparing to fields where experiments aren’t feasible and people are mostly pontificating. When people read books written by people that are crazy or lying but popular, you should be comparing to fields where professors are faking data to get publications—while also trading citations, of course. When you compare individuals to something like experimental physics or civil engineering, you should be comparing that to something like cooking food.
But in a world where everyone in the last three generations was an autodidact, you most likely wouldn’t be good at math, because you most likely wouldn’t even know that there was such a thing as math.
This seems false. Often those who are rich get rich off of profitable subjects, and end up spreading awareness of those subjects. Many were never taught programming in school, yet learned to program anyway. Schools could completely neglect that subject, and still it would spread.
I agree with you there. There are numerous benefits of being an autodidact (freedom to learn what you want, less pressure from authorities), but formal education offers more mentorship. For most people, the desire to learn something is often not enough even with the increased accessibility of information, as the material gets more complex.
I suspect this may actually be the most important thing the educational system does.
You can learn from books or online videos. You can find fellow learners on social networks. You can find motivation… at random places.
But without being shown a direction, you will probably get lost in a sea of nonsense. A simple advice, such as “chemistry is the thing you should study, not alchemy” can save you decades of time you might otherwise waste learning useless things.
It is easy to notice the damage school system does, and easy to take its benefits for granted. Even if you are homeschooled, you are still exposed to people who got the right directions. (People from crazy religious families may be prevented from getting the right direction in e.g. biology or sex education, but they will still probably get the right directions about math or chemistry or geography.) This did not happen spontaneously. It was the educational system that redirected billions of people from thinking about superstitions and magic and astrology and homeopathy and whatever else, towards thinking about math and physics and chemistry and geography and history. Even if for many people the success is only partial, the fact that they even know about the useful stuff means a lot.
In today’s world, you can become good at math without spending a single day at school. But in a world where everyone in the last three generations was an autodidact, you most likely wouldn’t be good at math, because you most likely wouldn’t even know that there was such a thing as math. (Unless you would be lucky to be born in a family of mathematicians.) Instead you would spend your time learning… some nonsense. Some difficult nonsense that requires high IQ and lot of studying to get it impressively right. Just like Newton spent half of his life doing astrology.
Autodidacts are easily recognized by their unknown unknowns. They may know a lot, but what they don’t know, they usually don’t even know that it exists.
The thing is, I’ve noticed that a lot of the curriculum in schools is blind imitation of high-status science-y people, which can end up as cargo culting. Textbooks and classes have students memorize terms for certain things because “smart people know those words, and we should make kids be more like the smart people”—but they use those words because they understand underlying concepts, and without that the words can be useless.
This reminds me of Feynman talking about textbooks.
Now that we have the internet, you can simply see what kinds of technical language experts use and learn about those terms yourself. The distinctions “autodidact” is supposed to imply might have been weakened by the internet, and for that matter by libraries.
Of course, you’d also have to pick the experts you’re going to imitate on your own, but then, you also have to pick professors or schools or textbooks. Following a societal consensus about competence should work about equally well either way.
I remember talking with a director of a Max Planck institute. Ion transport was relevant to the conversation, and I said something about how “of course, while lithium ions are light, that doesn’t mean they diffuse quickly because they’re strongly bound to their solute complex, more than sodium ions”. He said, “Aha, I see you’re well-educated”. I thought that was funny because that wasn’t something I ever took any classes on or got mentoring about. The other funny thing about that conversation was that his pet project was this energy storage idea that had no chance of working because he didn’t understand ion solvation well enough.
I think we probably agree on how far the existing system is from the ideal. I wanted to point at the opposite end of the scale as a reminder that we are even further away from that.
When I was at the first grade of elementary school, they tried to teach us about “sets”, which mostly meant that instead of “two plus two equals four” the textbook said “the union of a set containing two elements and another set containing two elements, has four elements”. In hindsight I see this was a cargo-cultish version of set theory, which probably was very high-status at that time. I also see that from the perspective of set theory as the set theorists know it, this was quite useless. Yes, we used the word “set” a lot, but it had little in common with how the set theorists think about sets. Anyway, we have learned addition and subtraction successfully, albeit with some extra verbal friction.
Compared to that, when I tried to learn something in my free time as a teenager, people around me recommended me to read books written by Däniken, the Silva method of mind control, Moody’s Life after Life, religious literature, books on meditation, and other shit. I have spent a lot of time practicing “altered states of consciousness”, because (from the perspective of a naive teenager who believed that the adults around him are not utter retards, and the people they consider high-status are not all lying scumbags) it seemed like a very efficient intervention. I mean, if you get the supernatural skills first, they will give you a huge multiplier to everything you try doing later, right? Haha, nope.
So while I hate school with a passion, as many people on Less Wrong do, the alternative seems much worse. Even the books I study in my free time now were often written in the context of the educational system, or by the people employed by the educational system.
I don’t trust societal consensus at all. Look at the YouTube videos about quantum physics, 99% of them is some crap like “quantum physics means that human mind had a mystical power over matter”. Even if you limit yourself to seemingly smart people, half of them believe that IQ isn’t real because Nassim fucking Taleb said so. Half of the popular science does not replicate.
I think you’re comparing apples to oranges here. When people get into topics where they have no personal contact with reality, you should be comparing to fields where experiments aren’t feasible and people are mostly pontificating. When people read books written by people that are crazy or lying but popular, you should be comparing to fields where professors are faking data to get publications—while also trading citations, of course. When you compare individuals to something like experimental physics or civil engineering, you should be comparing that to something like cooking food.
This seems significantly overstated. Most subjects are not taught in school to most people, but they don’t thereby degrade into nonsense.
This seems false. Often those who are rich get rich off of profitable subjects, and end up spreading awareness of those subjects. Many were never taught programming in school, yet learned to program anyway. Schools could completely neglect that subject, and still it would spread.
I agree with you there. There are numerous benefits of being an autodidact (freedom to learn what you want, less pressure from authorities), but formal education offers more mentorship. For most people, the desire to learn something is often not enough even with the increased accessibility of information, as the material gets more complex.