[lordnacho]

I think it's basically right. Go to college, see the outline of what people have figured out, and what they think you need to know. Also what the dead ends are eg broken window fallacy.

That's about it, though. You actually can learn all those things yourself, you just have to be pretty disciplined about following some sort of course or text, including the weird things that you have quite figured out are reasonably big.

You also won't actually know anything other than the outline once you're done. They throw so much at you and it seems detailed while you're studying, but you need to actually work with a field for a while to really understand it. You'll have the index though, and that's pretty useful for future reference.