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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

You left off (0) doing your own research when you run into a problem. These days, with search engines, google scholar, google book search, Wikipedia, IRC channels full of folks trying to prove their knowledge, easy access to professors’ email addresses, etc., it’s easier than ever before.

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You run into a bootstrapping problem: The information you find first determines which information you see as credible later, so you might end up having to unlearn a lot of bullshit before you actually get up to speed.

A good teacher will, if nothing else, get you over that hump and pointed in the right direction with the right instincts about who to listen to and which information is both correct and up-to-date.

For knowledge and facts, I mostly agree. I would add that doing your own research is what you do while attempting method 3 and get stuck. But I think the article, and my original point, was about subject area wisdom. The larger lessons behind past failures, and the stuff that can save you unnecessary detours. There is much value in digging into a problem for a long time; you really do own it. But some things are just a waste of time to learn that way, and are better primed with the guidance of someone who can present that collective wisdom to you in a way in which you understand.

It's easier to be overloaded by the volume of information too.

It is unfortunate, but it compliments cognitive decision making well; ingest information from multiple sources, identify outliers and inconsistencies, the truth will present itself.

Not that simple. Usually leads to a local maxima that might not even be the maxima it appears to be. Really digging into all the sources of wisdom in our field takes a lot of time. Most only have a subset of that.

So, expecting those with the wisdom to present it in an approachable and efficient-to-learn way is reasonable. Only then should we critique those that didn't make the effort to learn.

Or you disappear down the rabbit hole and you find that 9/10 of the tutorials / references you're reading are completely wrong or outdated.

Seriously, I don't know if it's as bad in the network world, but I reckon PHP tutorials were the reason SQL injection was as prevalent as it was.

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