Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.
Maybe we disagree on what it means to “lone wolf.” If I try to steel-man your position, I can come up with a weak and a strong interpretation:
The weak interpretation is that being a autodidact (capable of learning things on your own) will bring you higher chances of success. Being an autodidact myself, I agree from anecdotal experience. Also just being an expert in your field means developing autodidact skills at some point because eventually you surpass the level of all available classes and have to learn from the latest research journals and technical reports. However I would argue that this should still remain a social activity where you continue to interact with collaborators and bounce ideas off of trusted colleagues in order to avoid many of the pitfalls that come from truly working alone. This isn’t a lone wolf so much as a free-thinking pack wolf, to carry the metaphor, that enjoys the best of both worlds.
The strong interpretation is that you will or even can be successful by truly embarking on a lone quest all by yourself. It is this interpretation that I disagree with so strongly for the reasons given. In my experience smart people who go the “lone wolf” route inevitably end up in crackpot / crank territory as they accumulate bad ideas in their personal blind spots, assuming they don’t fall prey to akrasia in the first place. In this sense I agree with the OP: glorifying the “lone wolf” path has done a lot of harm to a lot of LW’ers.
Your post said:
Maybe we disagree on what it means to “lone wolf.” If I try to steel-man your position, I can come up with a weak and a strong interpretation:
The weak interpretation is that being a autodidact (capable of learning things on your own) will bring you higher chances of success. Being an autodidact myself, I agree from anecdotal experience. Also just being an expert in your field means developing autodidact skills at some point because eventually you surpass the level of all available classes and have to learn from the latest research journals and technical reports. However I would argue that this should still remain a social activity where you continue to interact with collaborators and bounce ideas off of trusted colleagues in order to avoid many of the pitfalls that come from truly working alone. This isn’t a lone wolf so much as a free-thinking pack wolf, to carry the metaphor, that enjoys the best of both worlds.
The strong interpretation is that you will or even can be successful by truly embarking on a lone quest all by yourself. It is this interpretation that I disagree with so strongly for the reasons given. In my experience smart people who go the “lone wolf” route inevitably end up in crackpot / crank territory as they accumulate bad ideas in their personal blind spots, assuming they don’t fall prey to akrasia in the first place. In this sense I agree with the OP: glorifying the “lone wolf” path has done a lot of harm to a lot of LW’ers.