billswift comments on Is That Your True Rejection? - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 December 2008 02:26PM

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Comment author: billswift 06 December 2008 04:03:27PM 0 points [-]

Robin: Of course a PhD in "The Voodoo Sciences" isn't going to help convince anybody competent of much. I am actually more impressed with some of the fiction I vaguely remember you writing for Pournelle's "Endless Frontier" collections than a lot of what I've read recently here.

Poke: "formal education: one is broad, you're exposed to a variety of subject matter that you're unlikely to encounter as an autodidact"

I used to spend a lot of time around the Engineering Library at the University of Maryland, College Park before I moved away. In more than ten years I have never met anyone there as widely read as myself. This also brings to mind a quote from G Harry Stine's "The Hopeful Future" about how the self-taught are usually deficient in some areas of their learning - maybe so, but the self-taught will simply extend their knowledge when a lack appears to them. My lacks are from a lack of focus not breadth. Everybody I have ever met at the University was the other way around, narrow and all too often not even aware of how narrow they were.