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by mungoid
3580 days ago
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I agree 100% with you and, most of my situation was because I lean a bit too far in the "against the grain" category. Because of that, I definitely made it more difficult for myself and would regularly lose drive to continue because I felt "I'm not getting it, I suck. Why can't I learn this the normal way?" >Being self taught can easily lead the learner to some critical mistakes. ... I really glad you brought that up. There have been countless times that I was working on some formula which looked good to me, and even had correct results (some of the time), only to find that it was completely backwards when someone else looked at. Its essentially like learning to program versus learning to program correctly. I cant tell you how many times I pronounce words incorrectly because I have only read it and never heard someone talk about it. Also embarrassing. I have actually read that same thing about your [2] foot note and I wanna say I saw it here on HN but cannot remember when. It was pretty interesting and I can totally see how not learning math the proper way can cause a lot of issues related to research. In my case doing physics for simulations, its not as pronounced, because its a small user base but in a larger scale, I would be terrified of publishing my work for this exact reason. And I by no means intend on convincing others to learn this on their own. I would actually suggest doing it the standard way because it was much more difficult and time consuming trying to learn this stuff by your own. Especially since I had no real person to talk to about it. I kinda wish I could have gone back and changed majors. |
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I think many people forget that THIS is what a Scientist is. Someone subjected to their peers. This humble way of looking at things (that our work isn't accepted until it's verified/peer-reviewed), is our way of life. It's a shame to me that the current culture has a massive backlog of research, without peer review.
I'm grateful for your reply as it will give others insight into the 'less trodden path' of trying things yourself. It worked for you, so that should motive others. And hopefully I added to the conversation to encourage others to seek out peers/mentors, since that will accelerate their learning.