Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?

48 pointsDrNuke48 comments

HN is the cream of the high-octane tech intellectual powerforce out there so I have no doubts many and many will contradict my point: online self-education is a delusion because passive enthusiasts and desperate folks do not just really need tools but a purpose or a market. A purpose is needed to apply that knowledge in a domain (but few have a domain knowledge), a market is needed to get money from the effort (but remote work is actually not so easy & available). More in general, the very recent democratisation of knowledge opens the average joes and marys from marginal markets, minorities etc. etc. to a nice range of personal opportunities to climb the ladder but also to exploitation and depression, once they understand they are still where they started from. I want to say that the world still needs local hubs with real persons from different backgrounds with different needs to create and sustain a market, so possibly knowledge dissemination should come on top of other actions to make a real impact for a great number of persons.

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(1) Learn something.

(2) Develop a portfolio (e.g. Github) leveraging #1

(3) Apply for jobs leveraging #1 & #2

(4) Apply for your next job leveraging #1, #2, and #3.

(5) Repeat

Honestly the route of a traditional college education is exactly the same, except replace #2 with "a magical piece of paper which asserts I know #1." People sometimes struggle because they jump from #1 to #3, and have no way of showing they can apply the knowledge obtained in #1.

But it really depends what you're learning. If you took a bunch of mechanical engineering self-taught courses, it is unlikely anyone is going to let you design a bridge. Whereas technology related fields are a little bit more flexible.

Going this route will always exclude you from some jobs, since they have hard requirements for a college degree. But there's plenty of small-medium businesses that only want to see you can do the work they want doing and will accept their low[er] initial salary.

> But it really depends what you're learning. If you took a bunch of mechanical engineering self-taught courses, it is unlikely anyone is going to let you design a bridge.

And yet Elon Musk, who studied aerospace on his own, is building rockets. John Carmack, who holds no degree at all, has done the same on a smaller scale.

Who let them?

selection bias?

Yes, but not in the way you think. They selected themselves.

Of course people know more of fantastic successes than those who end up in the middle or at the bottom of the heap. Many both with and without credentials fail. More of those with credentials succeed, but it is an extremely tenuous argument to claim that schooling caused its recipients to succeed rather than the more straightforward explanation that schools select those who would succeed even without them.

Selection bias is a factor (along multiple dimensions) and it isn't at all clear whether universities make a net positive or net negative contribution to their pupils. One thing is clear, however. It's better to force gatekeepers to filter you out rather than do the task for them.

Statistically, Elon Musk and John Carmack are "outliers".

Also... Would you let a self-though doctor put his hand on you? Yeah he/she did not go to a "formal university" and he did not do practice in a "real hospital" but hey, HE READ A BUNCH OF MEDICINE BOOKS!

Capitalizing entire words doesn't strengthen your case.

To answer your question, yes I would in cases where they are more educated than their schooled counterparts in the specific help I need. This is less common in medicine than in art, business or science, but it is not unheard of. In those cases, I would, and I have.

You should realize that with the exception of surgeons, most doctors lose skill throughout their careers. After medical school, doctors tend to slowly get worse in diagnostics and often ossify whatever was the best practice when they graduated. This is particularly clear in nutrition. Surgeons are an exception, due to the rapid feedback their work offers.

People who educate themselves are outliers already.

> Would you let a self-though doctor put his hand on you?

There are consequences here beyond time and money so it isn't nearly as much of an apt comparison.

> did not do practice in a "real hospital"

Medical doctors already go through many years of residency as well as continually take standardized tests to keep their medical licenses.

Also lawyers in California and Louisiana can skip law school by passing their boards (and undergoing a type of apprenticeship I believe).

AFAICT, neither of them have designed anything. Elon Musk has an executive role. Carmack's role is unclear. Happy to go through any information you've come across..

Carmack invented modern VR

"Modern VR" has a lineage dating all the way back to the 1950s and has seen progressive advancement (in step with technology) since. No single person invented modern VR, and certainly not someone who wasn't even involved until five-seven years ago that's absurd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History

This will no doubt boil down to some warped definition of what the term "modern" means.

Modern VR as in sticking a phone screen 50mm from your eyeballs. Carmack did a lot of the work tackling the latency and tracking issues.

That maybe correct, and I have huge respect for John (I've watched and re-watched all of his keynotes and lectures), but we're talking about rockets here.

>Elon Musk, who studied aerospace on his own, is building rockets. John Carmack, who holds no degree at all, has done the same on a smaller scale.

Do you dispute that Carmack built rockets?

Have you read Masters of Doom or even Googled the question?

http://bfy.tw/H8Z5

Indeed, he was part of a team that built rockets. I even said his role was unclear to me. Can you link to any document detailing his involvement?

Edit: Please don't take this as a diss on his work. Just because one didn't play a role in designing the rockets, doesn't mean they were not crucial to the project.

This really sums it up. I hope for more low cost, regionally accredited online universities in the near future. I'm particularly fond of University of the People's tuition free model (in which student's pay only for proctoring and assessment), and hope to see more developments similar to this but on a regional level. Or, alternatively, accreditation being awarded by universities if mastery of material is adequately and reasonably proven.

I find it sad that my favorite lecturers have all been online, yet I must pay the premium for services I don't necessarily want (namely physical, real time lectures in a geographically fixed location, and all the overhead associated with it) if I want 'real' accreditation.

Personally I think the issue is that we have come to accept and perpetuate the idea that college education is the main path to a high paying, well respected career. Higher education has essentially become a gateway to salaried jobs.

IMHO post-high school education should refactor to become more like a trade school system. 95% of the educational programs offered in university have little or nothing to do with real world job duties. For the few excepts (medicine, engineering, etc), the curriculum's are essentially split into theoretical knowledge and practical experience already (med school/residencies, lectures/internships, etc). I think that all colleges should become job training programs. Model it after already existing trade school programs where you spend two years split between real job experience and class room learning. This would give employers access to lower-cost labor in exchange for real-world experience.

Is online self-education delusion? Yes and no. A completely self taught education will never be held up to the same esteem as a 4 year degree. It's a bad filter, and I question any company who hires based on degree/no degree alone, but it's the filter that we've been trained as a society to use.

The quality of online education can be the same if not better than standard university. The difference rests on the education seekers ability to learn.

Online self-education is delusional in the fact that it is not a quicker/easier track to employment. But that's a symptom of a broken educational and workforce system, and not of online-education.

From experience, most of the coveted companies locally throw resumes without a four year degree in the trash as the first step of the hiring funnel.

From experience, most of them would have discarded their own founders' CVs.

Sure but does this have anything to do with a strict educational requirement or a practical requirement to somehow reduce the candidate pool? I have put out public job requests and had literally thousands of applicants. I have at times picked a lot of arbitrary methods for reducing the candidate pool to something useful.

They’d probably prefer to think the first, but the second is more likely given all the folks under employed these days.

Which companies are the coveted ones? Off the top of my head, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon happily hire people without degrees. Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs also do it. The lucrative private companies I can honestly think of that really won’t consider it are usually small and discreet, not well known and widely pursued.

You still need to pass the interview hazing, and structurally you won’t be “inducted” the same way new graduates are. But if you have prior experience most of these companies will take a look. Even recruiters contact people without degrees. In particular, back when Laszlo Bock was in charge of recruiting at Google he’d routinely say they hired non-graduates because none of their interviewing metrics appeared to have a strong correlation with employee success.

The companies you mention may in theory, but when a hundred resumes (coveted co/pos) show up guess who's go in the trash first? (With a friend on the inside it is different.)

In LA, it's JPL, SpaceX, Hulu, etc. I've applied at all these for jobs with twenty years experience and my resume doesn't last an hour in their system. Even had a previous job in aerospace at Rockwell.

In general I agree with your post, except the part about all colleges becoming job training programs. I think there is value in an environment that exists purely for academics, it just isn't what the vast majority of people look to education for.

Agreed - I should have clarified that I believe a purely academic environment is necessary, but should (ideally) be a non-profit venture. Continuous education should be encouraged, but we need to decouple the idea that a 4 year degree == career skills.

I am curious - do countries with free or very cheap higher education see as big of a divide between those with 4 year degrees and those without?

Ironically without an appropriate degree it can be harder to work your way into an average government contractor than a big tech company. In particular, I could see agencies like NASA strictly requiring an accredited degree as I know a lot several government contractors to do. I have a desire to someday work in space exploration, and have to make sure of knowing JPL & NASA's requirements ahead of time.

I have a Arts degree. I spoke with someone with prior experience at NASA. From what he told me, I would say their SWEs have backgrounds "diverse, but still very same". They come from many degrees, but they're all STEM degrees.

Assuming they don't have strict degree requirements, I could lay out a job path that goes from local web shop (I'm mostly a web developer) to local web & app shop. At this point I get to add Java to my resume for Android. Even though Android is going away from Java it will be years before it stops being used.

After 1-2 years of java experience I'll likely be more applicable for a lot of good software engineering jobs and on fairly equal footing with someone with a 4-year degree. I might still have that barrier of entry with JPL, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Now let's go to the other option, getting a more appropriate degree. I would like a second 4 year degree, perhaps in ECE or CS to complement my Art degree.

A lot of people also want to get another degree, but that's easier said than done since some options become harder and some become easier when you are in your mid 30's like me

I have no SO and no kids, so potentially I can be very mobile, but the lack of a job offsets that. How do you set aside years of time for another full degree, with a small support network, and prevent myself from living on the streets? I don't have any friends or family that I know of that'll let me life rent-free for years. I also have to consider if I have to return to the life of working a humbling service job. I'm not in my early 20's anymore so I can't be as flexible and open with part-time jobs and living arrangements.

It is a huge delusion.

Its promise was to bring education to all those who couln't previously reach it, either geographically, financially or for for time reason (fulltime work and no time to actually attend lessons).

Instead, it brought higher education to those who already had a formal education (see Udacity's OMS-CS) or by offering non-degree, informal "certificates" (edX's micro-masters and Coursera's certificates).

So if you want to get your bachelor's on-line, well you're out of luck. You can still access many courses (which is nice), and end up with a patchwork of knowledge that is certainly better than nothing, but is still a patchwork with all the things that this implies.

So yeah, imho online education did not disrupt a thing. Universities are still doing the same old thing, and very little changed.

"Online education" is a nice thing, but it is also definitely a failure in the end (as did not achieve its original purpose).

> So if you want to get your bachelor's on-line, well you're out of luck.

It depends who you want to get it from. The school where I studied law has offered online undergraduate and postgraduate law degrees for over a decade.

http://www.cdu.edu.au/law/external-law-degree

Doing certificates on edX and Coursera is the wrong path. Their certificates and "micro-masters" or "nano degrees" are worthless.

The way you do it is you go through a full 4-year program on MIT's OCW. You do the same assignments and write the same tests actual students did a decade ago. Then you take a GRE subjects test.

Whether or not you use the score to enter a graduate school, it carries weight. The same is true for those who self study through one or preferably two or three levels of the CFA examinations.

> The way you do it is you go through a full 4-year program on MIT's OCW. You do the same assignments and write the same tests actual students did a decade ago. Then you take a GRE subjects test.

Well surely you can do everything in your free time, but MIT is still not going to give you a degree of any kind for doing a full 4-year program on MIT OCW.

Yes. This is exactly why it's important to do a rigourous exam such as a GRE subject test or a CFA.

I think it's useful.

Everything I've learned about web development over the last 20 years has came from a combination of personal experience and self guided education (assorted free content and paid courses).

Courses are fantastic because you get the benefit of having an entire curriculum planned out for you as well as support from whoever is taking or running the course.

Not only that but if it's a good course, it's usually filled with a bunch of context, real world examples and thought processes from the instructor. These things can't be learned without a ton of experience, so in a way you're getting projected in the future with knowledge that may have taken years for you to figure out on your own.

Formal education has two purposes:

1. Convey knowledge.

2. Credentialing.

Self education can serve the first purpose, but not the second. Make sure you are clear which one you are wanting here.

I wanted to make that distinction as well. It is very important. The internet and ed-tech have quite clearly been fantastic for the motivated learners who want to teach themselves. It has made imho largely zero dent into doing away with the credentialing problem. And the credentialing is the #1 reason people go to school i.e. to get a degree, social bragging rights, and a job, its essentially a showoff function with real monetary rewards. This is the main factor of why people go to higher ed. If it were to learn the system would look vastly different and have a much different design. This much, however, is not obvious since very few people will actually admit this is the primary reason - education policy legislatures included.

Well, credentialing is important because it allows people who don't really understand what you do to judge if you are worth hiring. If you trust the credentialing authority, the credentials have meaning.

If you aren't looking for a job per se, they aren't important. If you want to make money online or start a business, they aren't important.

And that's something not everyone understands.

What if someone doesn't have the time investment to go back to school to get the adequate credentialing they need... eg. they need a full-time stable income to live, and this also rules out risking stable work for an internship.

I'm not clear what you are asking. Short answer: sucks, I guess.

But you can also look for scholarships or for other avenues to do the sort of thing you want to do. You list your needs, wants, etc and try to come up with solutions.

The question needs to be further defined, as usefulness can be evaluated in broad ways. To refactor the question:

1) Intrinsic usefulness, for personal improvement, satisfaction, development or solving one's own itch. Online self education is transformative. There was a time when specialized knowledge and technical knowledge was difficult to obtain. Unless you lived in a large city or a university town, your book choices were limited. There was no Amazon, no stack overflow, no abundance of technical content. For intrinsic benefit, online self-education is unequivocally yes.

As far as whether online self education is useful for participation in the employment market is less clear. At this time, it is not clear whether online self education has the signaling value to the market. This is less clear. If there is some form of certification that can be universally agreed upon then it will have more value. However at this time, this doesn't exist.

I agree with your main idea. Online self-education was implicitly promising stable, well-paying jobs for the people without the means for formal studies.

But instead of governments standardizing, expanding and accrediting these tools, they were abandoned. They are now only used to supplement normal studies.

In my opinion, the reason for that is preserving the status quo. We're used to the rhetoric of merit-based job distribution and knowledge/productivity based salaries.

If a country created university programmes that were nationally accredited (ie by taking tests with physical presence in addition to online classes) then high-paying jobs would be available to everyone. Or would they? Because to a large extent, university degrees are useless without connections. If everyone had access to higher education, the lie that the poor are just lazy and stupid would collapse, exposing the nepotism and corruption of corporate and government jobs, and also empowering the people to take over these jobs themselves.

You can see this difference in the contrast between countries like the US, where higher education is unreachable for most people, and thus owning a degree guarantees almost 10x higher salaries than the poor, and the many countries in the EU where free or subsidized education results in much lower wage inequality.

Making education so accessible that you can earn a degree by watching 2-3 hours of lectures per day would disrupt the current situation completely, exposing many pathologies of both the educational and employment systems.

There is another class of people who seek online education and actually benefit from it: enthusiasts with the sole purpose of learning something new. I know a guy at work who, while being a software developer, happily does online biology courses on the side.

On another note, I think mentors and a strong network helps in extracting purpose out of online learning. As software developers, a lot of us tend to undermine the importance of networking, especially in finding new jobs or growing within a company.

Even if most people aren't cut out to be "Good Will Hunting" auto-didacts, it's hard not to see wider availability of learning materials as a positive development. When it comes to risks of exploitation, I'm more worried that universities will increasingly leverage online courses as a way to increase their profits at the expense of their students' learning experience.

My experience with this is related to music, but since software engineering is similarly flexible with regards to qualifications, I'm sure it could apply.

I'm totally self-taught in music, using mostly books and the internet to begin, then just real world experience playing in jams and gigging for free with strangers. Eventually, I was able to fund myself in university through my post grad just by playing bass in a band. Auditions where you can show what you can do(by literally playing for others) isn't too dissimilar to coding exams in interviews, as well as having a "portfolio" of sorts.

So I would say that self-education is definitely useful. Although I've not experienced it in the world of software, I have first hand experience in it's usefulness elsewhere.

Whether you learn things online or in a classroom, in some sense there is always going to be a disconnect between academia and industry. Industry is where the rubber meets the road and academia is about abstracting it to a circle and line problem. I suppose trade schools could serve as a bridge in that regard. This is indeed a massive generalization, but I've found that people who are left brain dominant, and always in the habit of "citing" stuff, execute poorly on real life projects which are messy, will always have a lot of unknowns and deal with human factors.

> online self-education is a delusion because passive enthusiasts and desperate folks do not just really need tools but a purpose or a market.

I believe you are accusing online education of giving people ("passive enthusiasts and desperate folks" in your words) false hope?

I would contend the world is a better place for having free online education. Removing that would not address issues around 'purpose' or 'market'.

The job market is definitely there, although I am not quite sure why you single out 'remote work'.

With regards 'purpose' that can be defined by, and depends on, the individual. For example, learning about art history online might help with that novel you are writing.

I think your bone of contention is more with 1) the job market 2) the process of being credentialed.

Free online learning resources were never intended to address these issues and in many ways they can never do so.

I think what is needed (and I believe there are some options already available) is an open degree credentialing system. The way this would work is there would be an open syllabus that could be downloaded freely, with various learning outcomes and expectations provided. Examination requirements would be clearly specified. The student would then study from any or all of the available resources, and when fully prepared would attend an examination centre to sit the exams.

In the UK you can do this already at GCSE and A level (there are some restrictions to this). You can download syllabus from the relevant exam board, example exam questions, recommended resources etc. You can study online resources, recommended text books and so on. You can even hire a personal tutor if you need to and there are some entities that will provide all the materials you need. What really needs to be done is for this to be expanded up to degree level and possibly beyond. So potentially the only thing you would pay for is to sit the exams. Of course this cannot address issues around market demand - that is more down to economic considerations, not the availability of online education.

So, I agree with you in the sense that free online education does not solve all problems, but then nor does a university education guarantee you a job or a purpose either!

I have no expectation that my online learning will amount to anything other than just plain fun. I learned, to some extend, astrophotography and astronomy, day trading, machine learning, and many other minor skills on just an undergraduate (BSc) degree in AI. I have absolutely no illusion that anybody in their right mind will ever hire me on just the online learning. It's just for fun. I didn't know how to do something, now I do. That's all there is to it I think. The rest is mostly just luck and having a big mouth.

It is a thing. I don't think any online course can beat a good teacher in a small classroom, but online courses can take you a long way, and are wonderful for the broad variety of courses available. YouTube recordings of university lectures are also very useful - MIT has excellent courses available for watching. Self-learning is not suitable for everyone, but if you have discipline and the ability to understand how things fit together in a subject, it can really work.

You have the choice to make online education useful, this would be the same in a traditional education as well.

The only thing that matters between these two different approaches to learning is if you can create value with the knowledge you gained. That is the only thing people will pay for, value.

There is no clear path to demonstrate the value you can create from the knowledge you gained and this is where I think a lot of people get lost.

Why the false dichotomy?

'Useful' toward what end? Beware that thinking related to "personal opportunities to climb the ladder" is going to be shaped, probably a little too much, in this forum by the technologies and economic forces now producing what passes for wealth and happiness. The current thinking is that the world and the future belong to the young, that young thinkers, leaders and workers have the greatest impact, and that any misstep causing a loss of speed coming out of the chute will predictably lower the path of life's trajectory, which inevitably peaks around age 35. Within that world view, one must learn as much as one can as fast and as early as one can, and personalized full-time education face-to-face with skilled teachers is a great advantage as long as it does not last too long.

Another perspective to consider accepts that one has a time to be young, and with some probability our paths traverse times to be mature, middle-aged, old, older, and superannuated. With this in mind, the argument for optimizing the entire path is strong. Find a way to do that, and you will be called wise.

Your question does not mention age and does not say that you are young. I should not assume that. Lack of lifelong learning is an alleged driver of the hideously extensive withdrawal from productive work now seen in persons who have reached age 40 or more. Unfortunately, widely available and affordable full-time education face-to-face with skilled teachers for persons of any age is not a feature of the current educational landscape that I know, so lifelong learning cannot proliferate unless it contains a considerable dose of self-education.

Consider that much of education, regardless of context, is self-education. Almost everyone learns almost everything best by doing it, and sadly, learns it fastest from their own mistakes. The greatest value of skilled teachers may be that they illuminate the learners' blind spots, but skilled peers can also do the same. Of course, learning styles, psychology, background, culture and personality determine who can learn what from whom, but a mixture of teacher-led and self-driven education may be best.

If education is a process sustained by society so that its citizens know what the good life is and are capable of making good lives possible with the goal that the citizens will actually live good lives, the proper time to evaluate our educations is when those lives reach completion. This means that now we should be considering the lives of those educated back in the 1940's and 1950's and evaluating the benefits and deficiencies of those educations accordingly. Similarly, a young person choosing a course of education today should at least spend a little time trying to think ahead to 2080 and project what they will then be glad they learned in 2018 and what they will wish they had learned in 2018.

The practical wisdom used to be, "To play billiards competently is a sign of a good education. To play billiards too well is a sign of a squandered education." Good luck.

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