[Eliezer]

As an autodidact (I never dropped out of anything, I just didn't go to high school after 8th grade) allow me to say that I have never, ever wondered how successful I could've been if I'd gone to college, nor yet suffered from impostor syndrome.

[FD3SA]

I would go as far as to say that, to an autodidact, structured education is akin to Chinese water torture. A Steady, predictable flow of bland facts hammered into your skull, while you cannot change flow rate, the subject or the scope. Also, you cannot escape.

I avoided the natural sciences throughout my entire secondary and post-secondary career, as I feared the catastrophic effects structured learning would have on my inherent passion for those subjects. The joy of reading Darwin and Hawking, and the resultant awe of the universe, could not have been manufactured in a structured learning environment.