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Yvain comments on Applied Picoeconomics - Less Wrong
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Did you go to school, did you go to school for a while and then leave, or are you entirely self-taught?
Your method is clearly better if you are able to think like that successfully, and my method is mostly born from the observation that I can't. I've heard it said that one of the effects of spending a decade or two in the school system is that it twists your mind to think more in the way typical of my system and less in the way typical of yours. And I find that people who managed to avoid school almost entirely, like Eliezer, radiate a sort of psychological healthiness I can only dream of.
I had the same feelings about school as you did, my parents refused to let me leave, and I ended out, over a few years, becoming the sort of person who could tolerate the school experience. Sometimes I worry that the process made me less able to do a lot of other things, like strive for excellence in the way you're describing.
Scott Aaronson writes about A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart.
For example, a quote about school geometry:
I haven't even finished reading Lockhart, and I am already unspeakably glad that I was homeschooled by a mom who cared about what math really was.
To add something of substance to the conversation: coming at math from an understanding of the game of it instead of the rote work, I've noticed that I'm better at applying it than most of my classmates in my (well-regarded state university) engineering school. I can't say how much of that is "innate" "talent", with all the sarcasm that the quotation marks imply, but I can't help but see how little of the rubbish that Lockhart describes was inflicted upon me and wonder if there's a correlation.
compared to what? evidence?
The Lockhart piece is great and deserves to be much better known. The only bad thing about it is that it pisses the reader off.
Thanks for the link to Aaronson's commentary; I hadn't seen it.
It does? I thought it was more heartbreakingly tragic than anything else.
The second; high school diploma and fifty-five credits at UCSC.
If you naturally like learning, school doesn't take away the opportunity to continue learning naturally, despite the school assignments. I always studied stuff obsessively, and school/university topics rarely correlated with what I was obsessing about at the time. If, on the other hand, you prefer other extracurricular activities, I doubt the absence of school would likely change your course.