Your story is inaccurate because it presents Alice and Bob as taking similar paths with similar outcomes. In reality most fields have an orthodox canon that people who learn them get strong familiarity with, whereas there’s autodidacts who take some very heterodox path than this canon and therefore end up with very unique sets of weaknesses and strengths in the field.
I agree with this. I’d add that some people use “autodidact” as an insult, and others use it as a compliment, and picking one or the other valence to use reliably is sometimes a shibboleth. Sometimes you want to show off autodidactic tendencies to get good treatment from a cultural system, and sometimes you want to hide such tendencies.
Both the praise and the derogation grow out of a shared awareness that the results (and motivational structures of the people who do the different paths) are different.
The default is for people to be “allodidacts” (or perhaps “heterodidacts”?) but the basic idea is that most easily observed people are in some sense TAME, while others are FERAL.
There is a unity to coherently tamed things, which comes from their tamer. If feral things have any unity, it comes from commonalities in the world itself that they all are forced to hew to because the world they autonomously explore itself contains regularities.
A really interesting boundary case is Cosma Shalizi who started out as (and continues some of the practices of) a galaxy brained autodidact. Look at all those interests! Look at the breadth! What a snowflake! He either coined (or is the central popularizer?) of the term psychoceramics!
But then somehow, in the course of becoming a tenured professor of statistics, he ended up saying stuff like “iq is a statistical myth” as if he were some kind of normy, and afraid of the big bad wolf? (At least he did it in an interesting way… I disagree with his conclusions but learned from his long and detailed justification.)
However, nowhere in that essay does he follow up the claim with any kind of logical sociological consequences. Once you’ve become so nihilistic about the metaphysical reality of measurable things as to deny that “intelligence is a thing”, wouldn’t the intellectually honest thing be to follow that up with a call to disband all social psychology departments? They are, after all, very methodologically derivative of (and even more clearly fake than) the idea, and the purveyors of the idea, that “human intelligence” is “a thing”. If you say “intelligence” isn’t real, then what the hell kind of ontic status (or research funding) does “grit” deserve???
The central difference between autodidacts and allodidacts is probably an approach to “working with others (especially powerful others) in an essentially trusting way”.
Autodidacts in the autodidactic mode would generally not have been able to work together to complete the full classiciation of all the finite simple groups. A huge number of mathematicians (so many you’d probably need a spreadsheet and a plan and flashcards to keep them all in your head) worked on that project from ~1800s to 2012, and this is not the kind of project that autodidacts would tend to do. Its more like being one of many many stone masons working on a beautiful (artistic!) cathedral than like being Henry Darger.
There is a unity to coherently tamed things, which comes from their tamer. If feral things have any unity, it comes from commonalities in the world itself that they all are forced to hew to because the world they autonomously explore itself contains regularities.
I don’t think this is always true, rather it depends on how uniform the applications are, and how accessible they are. Sometimes autodidacts teach themselves in an ivory-tower setting, whereas allodidacts at least has an ivory tower that has a social network guiding it somewhat towards practical tasks.
But then somehow, in the course of becoming a tenured professor of statistics, he ended up saying stuff like “iq is a statistical myth” as if he were some kind of normy, and afraid of the big bad wolf? (At least he did it in an interesting way… I disagree with his conclusions but learned from his long and detailed justification.)
I’d be curious if you have any good arguments for your disagreement. At least you seem to be thinking that IQ tests measure intelligence, which is a stronger assertion than I’d make.
However, nowhere in that essay does he follow up the claim with any kind of logical sociological consequences. Once you’ve become so nihilistic about the metaphysical reality of measurable things as to deny that “intelligence is a thing”, wouldn’t the intellectually honest thing be to follow that up with a call to disband all social psychology departments? They are, after all, very methodologically derivative of (and even more clearly fake than) the idea, and the purveyors of the idea, that “human intelligence” is “a thing”. If you say “intelligence” isn’t real, then what the hell kind of ontic status (or research funding) does “grit” deserve???
Intelligence and grit are differential psychology rather than social psychology. Social psychology tends to focus more on interventions (but also tends to have an order of magnitude lower sample sizes, hence replication crisis), addressing some of the objections that Cosma Shalizi raised.
These days, professional exams have been largely subsumed by university degrees, but there used to be people who’d just study on their own for a bar exam, highway engineer exam, actuarial exam, etc, and then go work in that field. How would that fit into your classification?
Your story is inaccurate because it presents Alice and Bob as taking similar paths with similar outcomes. In reality most fields have an orthodox canon that people who learn them get strong familiarity with, whereas there’s autodidacts who take some very heterodox path than this canon and therefore end up with very unique sets of weaknesses and strengths in the field.
I agree with this. I’d add that some people use “autodidact” as an insult, and others use it as a compliment, and picking one or the other valence to use reliably is sometimes a shibboleth. Sometimes you want to show off autodidactic tendencies to get good treatment from a cultural system, and sometimes you want to hide such tendencies.
Both the praise and the derogation grow out of a shared awareness that the results (and motivational structures of the people who do the different paths) are different.
The default is for people to be “allodidacts” (or perhaps “heterodidacts”?) but the basic idea is that most easily observed people are in some sense TAME, while others are FERAL.
There is a unity to coherently tamed things, which comes from their tamer. If feral things have any unity, it comes from commonalities in the world itself that they all are forced to hew to because the world they autonomously explore itself contains regularities.
A really interesting boundary case is Cosma Shalizi who started out as (and continues some of the practices of) a galaxy brained autodidact. Look at all those interests! Look at the breadth! What a snowflake! He either coined (or is the central popularizer?) of the term psychoceramics!
But then somehow, in the course of becoming a tenured professor of statistics, he ended up saying stuff like “iq is a statistical myth” as if he were some kind of normy, and afraid of the big bad wolf? (At least he did it in an interesting way… I disagree with his conclusions but learned from his long and detailed justification.)
However, nowhere in that essay does he follow up the claim with any kind of logical sociological consequences. Once you’ve become so nihilistic about the metaphysical reality of measurable things as to deny that “intelligence is a thing”, wouldn’t the intellectually honest thing be to follow that up with a call to disband all social psychology departments? They are, after all, very methodologically derivative of (and even more clearly fake than) the idea, and the purveyors of the idea, that “human intelligence” is “a thing”. If you say “intelligence” isn’t real, then what the hell kind of ontic status (or research funding) does “grit” deserve???
The central difference between autodidacts and allodidacts is probably an approach to “working with others (especially powerful others) in an essentially trusting way”.
Autodidacts in the autodidactic mode would generally not have been able to work together to complete the full classiciation of all the finite simple groups. A huge number of mathematicians (so many you’d probably need a spreadsheet and a plan and flashcards to keep them all in your head) worked on that project from ~1800s to 2012, and this is not the kind of project that autodidacts would tend to do. Its more like being one of many many stone masons working on a beautiful (artistic!) cathedral than like being Henry Darger.
I don’t think this is always true, rather it depends on how uniform the applications are, and how accessible they are. Sometimes autodidacts teach themselves in an ivory-tower setting, whereas allodidacts at least has an ivory tower that has a social network guiding it somewhat towards practical tasks.
I’d be curious if you have any good arguments for your disagreement. At least you seem to be thinking that IQ tests measure intelligence, which is a stronger assertion than I’d make.
Intelligence and grit are differential psychology rather than social psychology. Social psychology tends to focus more on interventions (but also tends to have an order of magnitude lower sample sizes, hence replication crisis), addressing some of the objections that Cosma Shalizi raised.
These days, professional exams have been largely subsumed by university degrees, but there used to be people who’d just study on their own for a bar exam, highway engineer exam, actuarial exam, etc, and then go work in that field. How would that fit into your classification?