Starting from the high-school level, most of the material in this post took me about 5-6 years (a year or two of high school plus four years of college).
I don’t think more than a year or two could be shaved off without somebody creating much better study material. (I do think a lot better study material could be made—the framing practica are an attempt at a prototype of that—but I found it very time intensive to make such things.) On the other side, I covered far more ground in college than the vast majority of people I know, and I don’t know how much of that is limited by natural ability vs just wanting to do it, so it could take a lot longer.
I’m more interested in the time this would take if one wasn’t constrained by being in college. My intuition is that you can go 2x faster on your own if the topic and the pace isn’t being imposed on you, but maybe college just matched your natural learning style.
That’s a good point. College did match my natural learning style pretty well (albeit with a larger-than-usual technical courseload, and a lot of textbooks/lectures on the side).
I find your 2x estimate plausible, though obviously very highly dependent on the person and the details; it’s definitely not something I’d expect to work for everyone or even most people.
Starting from the high-school level, most of the material in this post took me about 5-6 years (a year or two of high school plus four years of college).
I don’t think more than a year or two could be shaved off without somebody creating much better study material. (I do think a lot better study material could be made—the framing practica are an attempt at a prototype of that—but I found it very time intensive to make such things.) On the other side, I covered far more ground in college than the vast majority of people I know, and I don’t know how much of that is limited by natural ability vs just wanting to do it, so it could take a lot longer.
I’m more interested in the time this would take if one wasn’t constrained by being in college. My intuition is that you can go 2x faster on your own if the topic and the pace isn’t being imposed on you, but maybe college just matched your natural learning style.
Thanks for the data point in any case
That’s a good point. College did match my natural learning style pretty well (albeit with a larger-than-usual technical courseload, and a lot of textbooks/lectures on the side).
I find your 2x estimate plausible, though obviously very highly dependent on the person and the details; it’s definitely not something I’d expect to work for everyone or even most people.