Comment by autodidaterous on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently · 2011-05-15T07:00:14.576Z · LW · GW

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.

Comment by autodidaterous on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently · 2011-05-14T11:18:23.437Z · LW · GW

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.