AnlamK comments on Your Most Valuable Skill - Less Wrong
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Well, I pretty much told them I planned on spending all day surfing the Internet and playing video games until they stopped supporting me. You seemed to have a better excuse.
You also probably weren't shoved into special education after second grade. I spent third through seventh grade learning basically nothing from my actual schoolwork while the rest of my native school district caught up to me.
I'm always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
I'm sure we'd all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart - that's some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies - if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
One can waste a lot of time, especially at the start when most of the literature is inaccessible and one lacks common sense to at least look through standard curricula -- this can be easily fixed with the right guidance. Plus, it's not obvious that learning research science can be fun, something I had no idea about up to the last years of college (there was language barrier as well).
At the time, I didn't know my public library had such textbooks. :(