If a book exists in PDF on the web somewhere, I estimate a 90% of chance of finding it by at least one of the following four methods, which altogether take only a few minutes if you're practiced at it:
http://libgen.info/index.php looks pretty nice. Found a book I had a hard time finding elsewhere, in multiple editions.
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-library-nu
Scribd, Oyster, and Kindle Unlimited all give you a "netflix for books" type experience where you pay a monthly fee of about $10 and read as many books as you want (not newer books, unfortunately). (Kindle Unlimited might be better if you have a non-Kindle-Fire kindle device it will work well with, but since publishers don't like Amazon it will never have as good quality of a selection as the other two.) Your local library may also have ebook lending options.
BTW, if you want papers rather than books, this browser extension or this thread (actually, use this more recent one) may be of interest, esp. this site or this site or this site or this site (some of these might be searching the same database) or http://reddit.com/r/scholar or the #icanhaspdf twitter hashtag or this Facebook group
Note when using libgen search engines, gwern writes: "I've noticed the Libgen search engines seem to have problems with long titles and/or colons" so you may wish to strip those.
Someone else recommends searching on the Pirate Bay, especially when combined with "pdf"/other typical book file extensions...
I take strong issue with the entire field in two weeks claim. As a practicing "autodidact" for more than ten years post-university, I have assimilated many fields from the standard sciences (biochemistry, medicine, neuroscience, pharmacology, chemistry, physics, electronics, math, statistics, programming) to postgraduate level, to some arts (design, writing & drawing comics) and business topics.
Retrospectively fields like neuroscience were quite simple after learning biochemistry, and I would believe your two weeks claim for a specific aspect (i.e. LTP in hippocampus), but not for the entire field. For math it took me nearly two years of rigorous study to be able to talk to Math Phd's on a slightly lower level, and that was considered quite fast by my mentors (mathematics prof's).
Often I will want to know more about a specific part of a subject, e.g. antenna design. This took me over six months to get to grips with, even after all of my combined experience.
So, either I'm just a slow learner, you are some kind of super genius, the topics you are tackling aren't actually outside your domain knowledge or you are only learning superficially. Even reading enough to cover a field would take me two weeks, full time, let alone do all the exercises required to truly master it.
My suggestion to you (which I use as a reference point): download a universities postgrad exams for your topic. If you can't answer at least 50% of them correctly, you haven't mastered your subject area.
Oh goodness, no. I wasn't claiming mastery of these fields. I was claiming to have understood them well enough to get the information I wanted from them - well enough to have written the (relatively well-researched) posts I linked to in that sentence. Mastery of nearly all fields is not worth the investment of my time. That's what division of labor is for. But I have a much, much better understanding of these fields than reading a few Scientific American and pop-sci books will give someone.
You may want to clarify that when you say things like:
"As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks"
People might take it out of context :)
Division of labor is all well and good, but if you've spent much time around others in a business you soon realise that it isn't all that it's cracked up to be. There's a reason why so many of histories prolific inventors had an enormous array of skills in many different areas: because the only person you can really count on to be there is yourself. Employees and colleagues come and go, the only constant is you.
"As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks"
I also read this in a way that for a whole minute made me despair at my knowledge-acquisition abilities.
What I do is to try to obtain as much information as possible in written form (this is also why I generally avoid lectures and colloquia unless I feel like they're the only source of information on something). That way, I can refer to it months after I initially read it, and can also search for it (in my hard drive) as well. Furthermore, reading is faster than hearing someone say something, and you can always skip ahead if you want to.
This is also why I generally prefer email to real-life conversation, although I recognize that most professors prefer the latter right now (or they're more responsive if you're talking to them one-on-one).
I also try to post as much online as possible with my unique internet name (with my archiving utilities ready to archive them all) since it makes me easy to google what I've written. It also makes it easier for other people to find me, and sometimes they bring up things that I might have forgotten years ago. I'm not a scholar yet, but I can definitely imagine the potential for crowdsourcing if I become one.
==
I do appreciate tools like CliffNotes and SparkNotes. Other intelligent people may see those as signals of "low intelligence", but my...
One thing that I've found quite frustrating in my own experiences with academia is that rather than encouraging efficient scholarship, political expediency often requires one to be inefficient. One of my professors who has a pretty good record for getting students published taught us that it's usually best to try to name drop everyone working in the same narrow field you're trying to publish an article in, both to demonstrate comprehensive familiarity with the literature, and to flatter the egos of the people reviewing your paper, who're likely to be among the specialists in that field.
This generally requires scholarship well beyond the point of diminishing returns for learning useful, relevant information about the topic at hand, and I suspect the effort barrier contributes strongly to the insularity of many sub-fields.
But a paper with well-developed links -- especially a recent review article -- can be the best place to start learning a new topic or to build a citation list from.
This is actually a pretty frustrating place to start from. Often, the so-built "frame" is setting out to flatter the authors mentioned therein, instead of pointing out what's useful or informative. Moreover, since these sections are more about giving credit and inflating egos than about informing the reader, you're much more likely to see the paper in which an idea was introduced, rather than a more-informative survey paper, written 10 years later, after the important aspects of the concept are really understood.
I lament this state of affairs with the subdued passion of a 1000 brown dwarf suns.
It's ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
Ok, your next task is to figure out a way to make academics gain status by participation in that plan. :)
One might be underestimating the value that video lectures offer to certain people like myself. Reading a textbook demands to be proactive. If you are easily distracted, or don't really enjoy the subject, you have to force yourself to keep reading. In the case of video lectures you only have to bring yourself to start the video. Once the video is playing, your attention is naturally drawn to the ongoing action, whereas text is just inactive and has to be animated actively by the reader. Videos exhibit a tractive force, videos drag you along as they play.
Khan Academy really is amazing. I might write a post about how crazy effective Khan academy has been for my pupil. Mostly just by working through the practice exercises and watching the videos my (home-schooled) tutee has gone from struggling with long division to college level calculus in less than 6 months.
Just letting people see their progress (for math exercises) is really very motivating.
My main worry about autodidactism is that it seems dangerously easy to mistake a specific, technical term for its everyday meaning and get a twisted understanding of something. Take for instance the subtleties involved in the concept of "heredity", which have at times confused even co-authors of books on the subject:
...These issues are pathetically misunderstood by Charles Murray. In a CNN interview reported in The New Republic (January 2, 1995), Murray declared "When I - when we - say 60 percent heritability, it's not 60 percent of the variation. It is 60 percent of the IQ in any given person." Later, he repeated that for the average person, "60 percent of the intelligence comes from heredity" and added that this was true of the "human species," missing the point that heritability makes no sense for an individual and that heritability statistics are population-relative. In a letter to the editor in which Murray complains about being quoted out of context (January 30, 1995), Murray quotes more of what he had said: ". . . your IQ may have been determined overwhelmingly by genes or it may have been - yours personally - or overwhelmingly by
There are also plenty of other subtle concepts which are easily and frequently misunderstood, even by people with degrees and publications in the field. (Just look at some of the statistics-related criticisms here...) Are there any good ways for an autodidact to avoid making such mistakes?
Look for informal forums where actual professionals from the field hang out (like computer science forums for example, or blogs of scientists), and try to catch them complaining about people constantly misusing some term?
To compliments inflated I've a withering reply;
And vanity I always do my best to mortify;
A charitable action I can skillfully dissect;
And interested motives I'm delighted to detect;
Apparently Gilbert and Sullivan knew Robin Hanson :)
Because you don't want to pad your bibliography and give the impression you know more about the topic than you really do. Also, the body may not match the abstract, the body may poorly substantiate its claims in the abstract, you should understand any document you're relying on to make your point, etc.
Why is this controversial?
Edit: In fairness, some people do intend "efficient scholarship" to mean "cite any paper with an abstract that looks like it agrees with you and hope no one asks questions", but I don't think that's what lukeprog means.
Here's a question: does learning to read faster provide a net marginal benefit to the pursuit of scholarship? Are there narrow, focused, and confirmed methods of learning to read faster that yield positive results? This would be beneficial to all, but perhaps moreso to those of us that have full time jobs that are not scholarship.
I've never had success with 'speed reading' in a way that allows me to consume more words per minute and have the same degree of retention and comprehension, especially for dense scholarly material.
Efficient scholarship benefits much more, I think, from learning to be strategic and have good intuitions about what to read - on the level of fields of knowledge, on the level of books and articles, and on the level of paragraphs within books and articles. I've been doing something like what I described in this post for at least two years and I have the impression that this is where I've gained the most utility.
The difference between somebody who is just getting into continuous scholarship and myself is, I suspect, almost entirely to be found in the fact that I can be extremely strategic about which fields of knowledge to consume, which books and articles to consume within those fields, and which paragraphs within those books and articles to consume. That's only what it seems like to me, though.
Genuine 'speed reading' can be achieved with a different brain architecture than I have, of course.
Long after first seeing this post, I decided to go back and upvote this and related lukeprog articles. The reason is that I've started reading Luke's draft paper The Singularity and Machine Ethics, and I'm sufficiently impressed that I now think Luke may have figured out how to do philosophy correctly. I now encourage everyone to take what he says about philosophy, and scholarship in general, extra-seriously.
How do you record your findings for future use, and how do you make sure you don't forget the important parts?
There are three things I do that save hours a week each, giving me more time for scholarship: 1) voice-recognition software: most people can talk a lot faster than they can type, even including corrections 2) reading while riding a stationary recumbent bike: can transcribe highlighted sections later, or even read from a computer and copy and paste 3) phone headset: do housework or exercises on the phone
I also have a list of tips that save minutes a week each, if people are interested.
I'm a slow reader, so one of the most exciting things about the future of scholarship for me is the huge increase in video lectures on youtube. This is a really exciting time to be an autodidact.
Anyone who is studying technical material on their own should be aware of the stackexchange.com network of sites and mathoverflow.net. These sites are incredibly useful for getting answers for questions which aren't answered in the textbooks. And if you aren't automatically coming up with those kinds of questions regularly while reading the material, you're doing it wrong.
EDIT: Corrected typo.
I had a full-time regular day job up to March 4th of this year. To have time to do scholarship, it helps to:
Right now, solving the 'first stage' of metaethics and then making novel progress on CEV. That's where almost every heavily-cited post I've written on LW has been heading.
And don't use the Internet as effectively your television.
(I am terrible for doing just this, so don't do as I do.)
You're freaking right about reviews being the holy grail! Every source they cite (at least in the ones I've looked at) has had a downloadable pdf at the top of the google search that mentions the name. Sometimes even with just the year and last names of the people involved.
Those who love independent study may wish to support the kickstarter project Don't Go Back to School.
Question to lukeprog: Do you have any efficiency recommendations for more technical subjects? Stuff on the lines of Eliezer's quantum physics sequence (aiming more than that, but at least that much). The thing that weighs on my mind most when dealing with such subjects is testing my own competence ... and so it takes me a considerable about of time.
Oh, what fun! I get to correct the new guy that everyone admires :)
Do not take the suggestion in parent because it would take time away from the time-tested way of testing one's competence with technical material: doing calculations and proving theorems. About half of the work that goes into the production of a technical textbook should go into the creation of exercises that ask the reader to prove theorems and do calculations. There is in fact a well-regarded series of textbook supplements called Schaum's Outlines that are nothing but exercises.
Although the most effective learners will tend to spend a lot of their learning time proving theorems and doing calculations of their own choosing, it is important for the student of a technical subject to own textbooks with lots of exercises created by masters of the craft because (especially in the beginning) the student will sometimes lack the knowledge and (vitally) the motivation (specifically, the curiosity) required to choose the theorems and calculations from the space of all possible theorems and calculations in the subject.
I accept the correction. Anki decks are useful, but for technical material the exercises are probably even better.
But I'm afraid if you want to correct the new guy that everyone 'admires', that line goes around the block. See: the most-upvoted comments on almost all my posts.
You aren't the only one; there are many people already waiting (or attempting) to do that.
Imagine a movie theater or other venue with a very, very long line to get in, such that the line extends all the way to, and around, the nearest street-corner.
As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly. I'll share my research habits with you now.
Mmmm... me want!
(Which is to say: Nice lead-in!)
While I'm all for spending time and effort on research, I'd like to add to the above post that finding sources that fit one's research topic doesn't add up to good scholarship. It's close reading and critical thinking that do the deal when it comes to evaluating sources. The contribution above lauds the article "The nature of procrastination" (2007) by Piers Steel as a time-saving, thorough review article on the issue of procrastination. That article, however, even though it apparently was written by a published author of a self-help book on proc...
Great post. With respect to your final statement, I was wondering if using the results of your research to contribute to Wikipedia isn't the obvious thing to do? Not speaking to you specifically, lukeprog, but concerning the general topic.
Also, it would be interesting if your post here inspires other people here to also pursue similar research enterprises, which makes me think that this will involve a lot of duplicated effort. This is against efficiency, which makes me wonder if there's a good place for people to correspond when they are involved in similar research topics. But then I think the answer to this is also Wikipedia.
One very interesting implication. If this applies to fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence it probably applies to any field that is not so diseased that there's no there there. Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don't need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.
Academic paper reading slackers of Lesswrong, to the social science and law paper writing! It'll get you into a good grad school!
Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don't need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.
I think your impression is wrong. You are right that in many areas, if you're reasonably smart and have a strong amateur interest, it doesn't take very much time and effort to start asking questions and possibly even generating insight at the same level as accredited scholars. However, in such areas, and in many others as well, the most difficult obstacles are of different sorts.
First, a perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own. (If anything, academic publishing is so competitive that unless you have an earth-shattering breakthrough, it is difficult or even impossible to publish without intensely optimizing for passing the actual review and editorial process, rather than following some idealistic criteria of quality.)
Second, of course, there is t...
Very nice approach! I like the almost algorithmic flow; Other approaches i find important: a) talking to 2-4 people for 20 mins who are working on the problem but are not too far along (so the conversation can have an informal tone) b) talking to 1-2 people who don't have an idea about it ( this gives a bird's eye view) c) going to a conference to see what kind of language people use, what are the presentations at the cusp/current edge of development are up to; this also helps form connections (maybe for use of the first two steps)
What suggestions would you have for efficiently learning the modes of thinking from different fields? This seems important since different fields (and even different researchers) look at problems differently (often due to the nature of the subject e.g. physics vs. biology vs. computer science). Some elements of intuition seem universal but others seem to be emphasized in one field or another. While summary articles are good for the content they don't seem suited to learning how experts think about their classes of problems, similarly journal articles often...
I couldn't find a better place for this, but today I learned this tip:
A book's table of contents shows you its structure, but don't forget to skim the index too, to get a second look at how its content is distributed.
What do people here think about using audiobooks for study? I have a job that let's me listen to them all day so I take advantage of that. It is possible to download video lectures as audio and listen to them as well. I also have an Ipod touch which lets me listen to them at x1.5 speed. The biggest problem with them is that it is hard to find good hard academic stuff.
Q&A services are of a great use for figuring out the terminology. I saw many answered questions of this type on Quora.
reddit/r/scholar looks like it could be a useful resource for scholarly articles. I have not used it (yet) though so I don't know how useful it is.
Heuristics for searching, specifically for history. I'm not sure how much of this generalizes, but it's a look at such questions as whether you've collected enough information, and some emphatic material (mostly in the comments) against using advanced search too early.
Searching for primary literature for use in laboratory write-ups
I may be experiencing a fluke, but it appears that my university's library's website allows any computer to use it as proxy for viewing and downloading articles from many paywalled sites (in fact, every site it gives me access to with my student login, which is a very large selection). I only discovered this by accident, and I'm hoping it isn't unintentional on their part. If anybody is interested, the address is here. If you try it and it doesn't work, please tell me.
ETA: It appears that my browser simply cached my login, and that this service is unfortun...
You can save money by checking Library Genesis and library.nu for a PDF copy first...
This article is worth an upvote merely for containing this sentence. How could I not have known about these earlier?
This seems to be focused mostly on scientific research in specific fields. Do you have strategies for learning more general, lower-level skills such as essay-writing, report-writing, math, or programming?
Edit - please disregard this post
Studying in any way other than autodidactically is like rehearsing apophenia. Unless you are actively learning in a constructivist manner, which is only sustainable when self directed, you're probably wasting time.
"The fallacy is characterized by a lack of specific hypothesis prior to the gathering of data, or the formulation of a hypothesis only after data has already been gathered and examined.[4] Thus, it typically does not apply if one had an ex ante, or prior, expectation of the particular relationship in question before examining the data. For e...
Scholarship is an important virtue of rationality, but it can be costly. Its major costs are time and effort. Thus, if you can reduce the time and effort required for scholarship - if you can learn to do scholarship more efficiently - then scholarship will be worth your effort more often than it previously was.
As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly. I'll share my research habits with you now.
My first task is to find scholarly review (or 'survey') articles on my chosen topic from the past five years (the more recent, the better). A good review article provides:
If you can find a recent scholarly edited volume of review articles on the topic, then you've hit the jackpot. (Edited volumes are better than single-author volumes, because when starting out you want to avoid reading only one particular researcher's perspective.) Examples from my own research of just this year include:
If the field is large enough, there may exist an edited 'Handbook' on the subject, which is basically just a very large scholarly edited volume of review articles. Examples: Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2007), Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (2009), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience (2009), Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (2008), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (2011), Handbook of Relationship Intitiation (2008), and Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition (2010). For the humanities, see the Blackwell Companions and Cambridge Companions.
If your questions are basic enough, a recent entry-level textbook on the subject may be just as good. Textbooks are basically book-length review articles written for undergrads. Textbooks I purchased this year include:
Use Google Books and Amazon's 'Look Inside' feature to see if the books appear to be of high quality, and likely to answer the questions you have. Also check the textbook recommendations here. You can save money by checking Library Genesis and library.nu for a PDF copy first, or by buying used books, or by buying ebook versions from Amazon, B&N, or Google.
Keep in mind that if you take the virtue of scholarship seriously, you may need to change how you think about the cost of obtaining knowledge. Purchasing the right book can save you dozens of hours of research. Because a huge part of my life these days is devoted to scholarship, a significant portion of my monthly budget is set aside for purchasing knowledge. So far this year I've averaged over $150/mo spent on textbooks and scholarly edited volumes.
Recent scholarly review articles can also be found on Google scholar. Search for key terms, and review articles will often be listed near the top of the results because review articles are cited widely. For example, result #9 on Google scholar for procrastination is "The nature of procrastination" (2007) by Piers Steel, the first half of which is a review article, while the second half is a meta-analysis. Bingo.
You can also search Amazon for key terms. I recently searched Amazon for 'attention neuroscience.' Result #2 was a 2004 scholarly edited volume on the subject. A bit old, but not bad for my first search! I found the PDF on library.nu.
In order to find good review articles, textbooks, and scholarly edited volumes you may first need to figure out what the terminology is. When I wanted to understand the neuroscience of pleasure and desire, it took me a while to figure out that the neuroscience of emotions is called affective neuroscience. After consuming that field, I had learned a lot about pleasure but not much about desire. I then realized that I didn't care about desire as an emotion but instead as a driver of action under uncertainty. That aspect of desire, it turns out, is studied not under the field of affective neuroscience but instead neuroeconomics.
Similarly, when I was originally looking for 'scientific self-help', I had trouble finding review articles or textbooks on the subject. It took me months to discover that professionals call this the psychology of adjustment. Who would have guessed that? But once I knew the term, I quickly found two textbooks on the subject, which were good starting points for understanding the field.
Note that not every scholarly edited volume is a volume of review articles. New Waves in Philosophy of Action is a collection of new research articles, not a collection of review articles. It is a poor entry point into the field. Some edited volumes are okay entry points into the field because they are a mix of review articles and original research, for example Machine Ethics (2011). But remember that a 'good' edited volume on a subject does not protect you from the entire field being mostly misguided, like machine ethics or mainstream philosophy.
Also note that if you can't find an edited volume on your subject, one may be just around the corner. In 2007 there was no decent edited volume on neuroeconomics, but there were three review articles. Then in 2008, Decision Making and the Brain was released.
Once textbooks and review articles have given you a good overview of the key concepts and terms, open and closed problems, studies and researchers on your chosen topic, it's time to go granular.
Textbooks and review articles will point you to the articles most directly relevant for answering the questions you have, and the researchers working on the problems you care about. Visit researchers' home pages and check their 'recent publications' lists. Find the papers on Google Scholar and read the abstracts. Make a list of the ones you need to read more closely. You'll be able to download many of them directly from links found on Google Scholar. For others, you'll need to visit a university library's computer lab to download the papers. The university will have subscribed to many of the databases that carry the papers, and university computers will let you past the paywall (but on-campus wifi will not). To get access to a paper you can't get at a nearby university, you can:
I've never purchased an article from an online database because the prices are outrageous: $15-$40 for a 20-page article, usually. If I absolutely can't get access to an article, I make a judgement as to how much weight to give the study's conclusions, inferring this from the researcher's history and the abstract and responses to the article I can read and other factors.
Skim through promising research articles for the information you want, watching for obvious problems in experimental design or quality of argument. This is where your time investment in scholarship can explode, so be conscious of the tradeoffs involved when reading 100 abstracts vs. reading 100 papers.
You can also try contacting individual researchers. This works best when the subject line of your email is very descriptive, and is obviously about a detail in their recent work. The content of your email should ask a very specific question or two, quoting directly from their paper(s). Researchers are often excited to hear that somebody is actually reading their work closely, though philosophers get more excited than neuroscientists (for example). Neuroscientists are called for comment by the media somewhat regularly. This doesn't happen to philosophers.
Finally, if you've done all this work already and you're feeling generous, perhaps you could take a little time to write up the results of your research for the rest of us! Or, help make Wikipedia better.