[kylemaxwell]

Passions such as art history are far easier to pursue in life by constantly reading books, going to museums, and attending lectures. Computer science is impossible to engage with on a casual basis. It requires a massive and highly focused investment of time and energy, ideally with the world’s best teachers guiding you at the same time.

First, I don't know that I agree with the first bit. One may certainly dabble in art history (or many other liberal arts-type majors), but one won't get quite as much out of it as someone else who dedicates hours and hours to it over months and years. This holds true for all deep, non-trivial subjects.

Further, one certainly /can/ 'engage with CS on a casual basis'. People do it all the time, and they certainly don't always have "the world's best teachers" to guide them. Mentors, teachers, and professors play an important role, but many people do quite well in their chosen fields without that extra boost.

[dcosson]

I don't know how common it really is for someone to casually teach him/herself CS. Sure, a lot of people teach themselves to build websites or mobile apps, but ask them to, say, search/filter their results and it's pretty easy to see there's not a whole lot of scientific thinking going on. Learning Computer Science is very different than learning to code (i'm not saying it doesn't happen, but from my experience most casual coders don't care very much about the theoretical underpinnings - and don't often need to, with modern languages).

[kylemaxwell]

Of course, many people don't ever cross the gulf between "i can haz programming" and actual computer science. That doesn't mean they /can't/ self-direct themselves.

http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?page_id=152 (from HN recently) http://overhack.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/self-directed-compu... (my own)

[true_religion]

I agree, computer science is an applied goal-oriented branch of mathematics.

Many people simply don't read math papers for casual intellectual stimulation.

[_delirium]

I've noticed this with philosophy; I did a CS degree, and was self-directed "interested in philosophy", but found my handful of philosophy-minor classes massively helpful compared to only self-studying. I still mostly read philosophy on my own nowadays, but I often feel that I'm missing some of the more solid grounding that I'd have had if I'd done a full degree in it. Giving myself crash courses on background I'm missing by reading Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries isn't quite the same. I think it would've helped in my actual area of research as well (some AI problems are closely related to philosophy problems), but there's only so much time in undergrad, at least if you plan to graduate in a reasonable amount of time, and the CS was probably on the whole more relevant than more philosophy would've been.