talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis,

Find the right books, and it'll probably be far more rewarding than talking to an author, simply because of the information density and better organization that you can get in written form.

An hour of reading Hennessy and Patterson's excellent book on CPU design will teach you a hell of a lot more than six hours of classes. I speak from recent quantitative experience here, which is where I got those specific numbers. The exceptions to this rule are local: particularly hard-to-understand concepts like the Tomasulo algorithm are a lot easier to wrap your head around if you have someone to walk you through them. But for the most part, a well-written textbook can teach you better than a person talking with you.

One problem is that most textbooks just aren't written that well. Often they're too concerned with signaling academic status, and they forget to make the book something that people will want to read. Just because an author can go off on a tangent about graph isomorphisms doesn't mean they should. Other times they get bogged down in obscure details up front, killing off people's interest. There are other failure modes, too depressing to list here.

By the way, I think that one reason why wikis are so easy to learn from is because you can skip past the boring stuff until you need it. This makes reading a wiki more fun, and also leads to tab explosions, keeping you hooked. I figure that this could significantly improve on the traditional textbook model, despite all those nice things I said about it earlier in the post.

(In honor of the tab explosion, I've stuck in a bunch of links to pages that might be interesting.)

talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis

Only if he were an exceptionally bad writer. 200 pages contains a lot more information than you can fit into most conversations. Not to mention being more logically structured.

Of course, a conversation is more interactive and lets you ask about the things that were left unclear, as well as clear up misunderstandings... but I don't think that anywhere near compensates.

What you could argue is that talking to the author is time more efficiently spent, as it gives you a better idea of whether her thesis is worth reading.

But actually it also applies only insofar as you have already studied the field. Programming forums are great, but we've all seen the guy who shows up to post a tutorial question verbatim and appends "send me the code plz", and we all understand he's just wasting everybody's time. You have to read the textbooks and at least seriously attempt the tutorials yourself before you can ask the right questions on the forum.

I think you misunderstand the problem. I know I can override the formatting. It's just that if I did so, it would invalidate my claim that I have software that lets me call up forum screen names with hotkeys, and replaces the spaces with underscores in forums that allow spaces in names.

In other words, people would know I was needlessly typing out their whole screen name and adding underscores, and it wasn't just some glitchy software.

You need to be careful of supposed Chinese proverbs; I recently found that the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" was actually created in the fifties by Eric Frank Russell.