My main worry about autodidactism is that it seems dangerously easy to mistake a specific, technical term for its everyday meaning and get a twisted understanding of something. Take for instance the subtleties involved in the concept of "heredity", which have at times confused even co-authors of books on the subject:

These issues are pathetically misunderstood by Charles Murray. In a CNN interview reported in The New Republic (January 2, 1995), Murray declared "When I - when we - say 60 percent heritability, it's not 60 percent of the variation. It is 60 percent of the IQ in any given person." Later, he repeated that for the average person, "60 percent of the intelligence comes from heredity" and added that this was true of the "human species," missing the point that heritability makes no sense for an individual and that heritability statistics are population-relative. In a letter to the editor in which Murray complains about being quoted out of context (January 30, 1995), Murray quotes more of what he had said: ". . . your IQ may have been determined overwhelmingly by genes or it may have been - yours personally - or overwhelmingly by environment. That can vary a lot from individual to individual. In the human species as a whole, you have a large genetic component." The Bell Curve itself does not make these embarrassing mistakes. Herrnstein, the late co-author, was a professional on these topics. But the upshot of part of this essay is that the book's main argument depends for some of its persuasive force on a more subtle conflation of heritability and genetic determination. And Murray's confusion serves to underscore just how difficult these concepts can be, even for someone so numerate as Murray.

There are also plenty of other subtle concepts which are easily and frequently misunderstood, even by people with degrees and publications in the field. (Just look at some of the statistics-related criticisms here...) Are there any good ways for an autodidact to avoid making such mistakes?