[spudlyo]

Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them.

Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".

[cheesecakegood]

I think the book Superlearning just gives the simple rule that you should spend 10% of your budgeted time on meta concerns (what to learn, what order, what strategies to use, etc) and that’s always seemed a sensible, good-enough default that takes away the doubt. Knowing how deep to go is, as you point out, only half the battle unfortunately, but the rule helped me at least.

[molybd3num]

reminds me of "tutorial hell"