What does "autodidact" mean?
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Your story is inaccurate because it presents Alice and Bob as taking similar paths with similar outcomes. In reality most fields have an orthodox canon that people who learn them get strong familiarity with, whereas there's autodidacts who take some very heterodox path than this canon and therefore end up with very unique sets of weaknesses and strengths in the field.
I agree with this. I'd add that some people use "autodidact" as an insult, and others use it as a compliment, and picking one or the other valence to use reliably is sometimes a shibboleth. Sometimes you want to show off autodidactic tendencies to get good treatment from a cultural system, and sometimes you want to hide such tendencies.
Both the praise and the derogation grow out of a shared awareness that the results (and motivational structures of the people who do the different paths) are different.
The default is for people to be "allodidacts" (or perhaps "heterodidacts"?) but the basic idea is that most easily observed people are in some sense TAME, while others are FERAL.
There is a unity to coherently tamed things, which comes from their tamer. If feral things have any unity, it comes from commonalities in the world itself that they all are forced to hew to because the world they autonomously explore itself contains regularities.
A really interesting boundary case is Cosma Shalizi who started out as (and continues some of the practices of) a galaxy brained autodidact. Look at all those interests! Look at the breadth! What a snowflake! He either coined (or is the central popularizer?) of the term psychoceramics!
But then somehow, in the course of becoming a tenured professor of statistics, he ended up saying stuff like "iq is a statistical myth" as if he were some kind of normy, and afraid of the big bad wolf? (At least he did it in an interesting way... I disagree with his conclusions but learned from his long and detailed justification.)
However, nowhere in that essay does he follow up the claim with any kind of logical sociological consequences. Once you've become so nihilistic about the metaphysical reality of measurable things as to deny that "intelligence is a thing", wouldn't the intellectually honest thing be to follow that up with a call to disband all social psychology departments? They are, after all, very methodologically derivative of (and even more clearly fake than) the idea, and the purveyors of the idea, that "human intelligence" is "a thing". If you say "intelligence" isn't real, then what the hell kind of ontic status (or research funding) does "grit" deserve???
The central difference between autodidacts and allodidacts is probably an approach to "working with others (especially powerful others) in an essentially trusting way".
Autodidacts in the autodidactic mode would generally not have been able to work together to complete the full classiciation of all the finite simple groups. A huge number of mathematicians (so many you'd probably need a spreadsheet and a plan and flashcards to keep them all in your head) worked on that project from ~1800s to 2012, and this is not the kind of project that autodidacts would tend to do. Its more like being one of many many stone masons working on a beautiful (artistic!) cathedral than like being Henry Darger.
There is a unity to coherently tamed things, which comes from their tamer. If feral things have any unity, it comes from commonalities in the world itself that they all are forced to hew to because the world they autonomously explore itself contains regularities.
I don't think this is always true, rather it depends on how uniform the applications are, and how accessible they are. Sometimes autodidacts teach themselves in an ivory-tower setting, whereas allodidacts at least has an ivory tower that has a social network guiding it somewhat towards practical tasks.
But then somehow, in the course of becoming a tenured professor of statistics, he ended up saying stuff like "iq is a statistical myth" as if he were some kind of normy, and afraid of the big bad wolf? (At least he did it in an interesting way... I disagree with his conclusions but learned from his long and detailed justification.)
I'd be curious if you have any good arguments for your disagreement. At least you seem to be thinking that IQ tests measure intelligence, which is a stronger assertion than I'd make.
However, nowhere in that essay does he follow up the claim with any kind of logical sociological consequences. Once you've become so nihilistic about the metaphysical reality of measurable things as to deny that "intelligence is a thing", wouldn't the intellectually honest thing be to follow that up with a call to disband all social psychology departments? They are, after all, very methodologically derivative of (and even more clearly fake than) the idea, and the purveyors of the idea, that "human intelligence" is "a thing". If you say "intelligence" isn't real, then what the hell kind of ontic status (or research funding) does "grit" deserve???
Intelligence and grit are differential psychology rather than social psychology. Social psychology tends to focus more on interventions (but also tends to have an order of magnitude lower sample sizes, hence replication crisis), addressing some of the objections that Cosma Shalizi raised.
These days, professional exams have been largely subsumed by university degrees, but there used to be people who'd just study on their own for a bar exam, highway engineer exam, actuarial exam, etc, and then go work in that field. How would that fit into your classification?
what's the key difference? What is the essence of autodidact-ness?
There are no essences of words. This word, "autodidact", in general means someone who has taught themselves some subject without a teacher. In the anecdote about Alice and Bob, this is true of both of them regarding chemistry, since Alice's lecturer might as well be a rubber duck.
However, the word is often loaded with a pejorative air, to suggest that the autodidact has learned only by studying books, without the guidance of personal interaction with experts or even other students of the subject, and has thereby obtained an understanding that is distorted or superficial.
However2, there are many who have achieved distinction in an area while having no formal education in it.
However3, everyone must at some point take responsibility for their own learning, and treat books, teachers, and fellow students all, as resources to use, not nipples to suck.
However, the word is often loaded with a pejorative air, to suggest that the autodidact has learned only by studying books, without the guidance of personal interaction with experts or even other students of the subject, and has thereby obtained an understanding that is distorted or superficial.
I haven’t seen the word used pejoratively, only in praise. Got examples of this usage?
No, it’s just a sense of the word I’m familiar with. But I find that googling “mere autodidact” gives a wealth of examples.
Only googling with quotes gets it used in this way.
Without quotes:
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This very post
With quotes:
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Natalie Shau - The Most Overrated Artist in Contemporary Digital Art, edit: its used sarcastically in this one. I think the artist being criticized is the writer herself--at least that's what the url indicates. Maybe it was just made for this one post though.
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What is philosophy and why should I study it?, its used ironically in this one too.
So I think its mostly used in the positive sense.
1I think this touches on an important concept in education: the educational system provides motivation and peer learners much more than it provides instruction. I've taught, and it seems to me that a good lecture is much more about motivating students to care and think about a topic than explaining concepts that are available in the textbook and in an easy web search.
The education system also tells students which topics they should care about and think about. Designing a curriculum is a task all by itself, and if done well it can be exceptionally helpful. (As far as I can tell, most universities don't do it well, but there are probably exceptions.)
A student who has never heard of, say, a Nash equilibrium isn't spontaneously going to Google for it, but if it's listed as a major topic in the game theory module of their economics course, then they will. And yes, it's entirely plausible that, once students know what to google for, then they find that YouTube or Wikipedia are more helpful than their official lecture content. Telling people they need to Google for Nash equilibria is still a valuable function.
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.
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.
This seems significantly overstated. Most subjects are not taught in school to most people, but they don't thereby degrade into nonsense.
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.
As Richard Kennaway said, there are no essences of words. In addition to the points others have already made, I would add: Alice learns what the university tells her to. She follows a curriculum that someone else sets. Bob chooses his own curriculum. He himself decides what he wants to learn. In practice, that indicates a huge difference in their relative personalities, and it probably means that they end up learning different things.
While it's certainly possible that Bob will choose a curriculum similar to a standard university course, most autodidacts end up picking a curriculum wildly different. Maybe the university's standard chemistry course includes an introduction to medical drugs and biochemistry, and Bob already knows he doesn't care about that so he can skip that part. Maybe the university's standard course hardly mentions superconducting materials but Bob unilaterally decides to read everything about them and make that his main focus of study.
Bob is an autodidact. Alice is not.
Says who? I mean that not just in the rhetorical sense of the question. Who is it that's accepting or rejecting the claim of such a title, and why do Alice or Bob (or you) care what they say? I'll give one possible answer: it's often a convenient shorthand to say "I don't have credentials, but I'm not ignorant on this topic." Alice COULD claim to be an autodidact, but it's usually better for her to say "I have a degree in this."
That said, there are ALSO some common differences. None are identifying, and none apply ONLY to one group or the other. The bell curves overlap by a whole lot.
- Autodidacts often have surprising holes in their knowledge or modeling, where well-designed education includes mandatory coverage regardless of student interest.
- Autodidacts often don't know the idioms and vocabulary of a discipline as well as someone with formal training.
- Autodidacts are often (rightly or wrongly) dismissive of structured coursework.
- Autodidacts sometimes (perhaps as a result of the above) can combine elements of multiple disciplines, or see parts of the standard way of thinking that can be revised or extended.
There are whole communities and subgroups for which education is viewed suspiciously, and in those groups, "autodidact" is the preferred intellectual title. This is not the common case.