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Comment by arkano | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything, but

> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own.

I think this statement is lacking some truth. We can rewrite it as:

> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own, but it can take significantly more time and there's no guarantee of consistency (compared to someone learning with a teacher).

>some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field.

Yes, and part of this process is having your work peer-reviewed as novel by active researchers in the field of interest (and getting advice/corrections from them along the way to the finish). I see this as an integral part of the process.

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> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own, but it can take significantly more time and there's no guarantee of consistency (compared to someone learning with a teacher).

So, honest question, did you guys really learn anything directly from a teacher? I've gone through high school (obviously) and university but everything I've learned has been at home by reading about it (or simply practicing to become fast enough). The lectures tended to only touch the absolute basic concepts, and the actual learning you had to do at home. Maybe it had to do with the lectures being in giant halls with little to no interaction with the prof in most cases, and that probably changes if you're doing a PhD (or just go to a different university), but even during high school I pretty much never learned anything of note directly from a teacher. So if anything, it would have been significantly faster and more efficient for me to just get a list of topics to learn instead of sitting in class.

As for consistency, my friends from a different university learned in some cases completely different things. If we compare strictly what was discussed in class or required to pass tests, there would be surprisingly little overlap. (And neither overlapped very much with actual programming.) Even courses with essentially the same topic would often differ greatly in content, as the professor usually decided which particular things to focus on. Which is completely fine I mean you can't go in-depth into everything, but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets. And then of course if your have a CS degree and want to work as a developer, from my experience you have to learn the actual programming pretty much 95% on your own anyway, as most courses focus on purely theoretical topics, and programming simply requires a lot of practice.

>I pretty much never learned anything of note directly from a teacher.

I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on. It's this interaction that I find valuable, not just stating facts on a blackboard. As I have taught mathematics myself at the university level, I find that students don't really need me to read them the facts, I was more there to align their understanding.

As for consistency, I meant that you won't get to cherry-pick the topics that you like when learning on your own (or solve the problem sets that you find simple), which is a natural thing to do by the way. If you have your own curriculum and you stick to it, that's great, but I have found that when I allowed students to pick their own problems for homework, they grew weaker in some areas and stronger in others. This also didn't give me enough signal on their understanding in general, which meant that it deprived them of useful feedback.

> but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets.

Absolutely! I didn't mean consistency in terms of pushing out duplicates of the same, but consistency in terms of attacking a variety of problems in some course, allowing you to become well-rounded in your understanding. Once you reach that level, you can fill in the gaps and be comparable to a colleague that maybe had a slightly different curriculum.

>I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on.

Yeah, that actually makes sense. I suppose with programming (or anything CS related) I had this feedback loop much more readily available in forums, IRC or Stackoverflow etc. so I never really appreciated having this from a teacher. But outside of CS topics it might not be that easy.

Programming is also special in that you get quick, objective feedback from the compiler and tests themselves.

That's a lot harder to get in many fields.

That is really the most basic part of CS however. Anyone can fumble through with trial and error to get things to work. Design is the hard part, and you can trick yourself into thinking you designed something well just because it compiles and spits out what looks right.

"Does it compile" is indeed a low bar to clear, but you can also get fairly quick data on "how fast is it?" by benchmarking, and sometimes even "how well does it work?" (ML, compilers, etc).

> So, honest question, did you guys really learn anything directly from a teacher?

Reading papers and talking about them with professors has been one of the most invaluable parts of graduate school for me

>> it can take significantly more time

It can also take significantly less time. I'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.

>> there's no guarantee of consistency

There's no guarantee of that in any case.

I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field. I'm not sure, however, if college is strictly speaking necessary for that in the third decade of the 21st century.

> It can also take significantly less time.

Strong opinion, but I think that if you want to learn facts, you can learn them faster on your own. If you want to learn a new skill, you need somebody to check your ideas until you can get to a level where you can self-correct yourself.

> II'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.

Sure, and I agree, most of the time I would prefer to study on my own instead of going to the lecture. However, it was incredibly useful to have an expert that could align my understanding whenever I was off to the wrong path; I think those were the opportunities for learning, not reading facts of off the board.

> There's no guarantee of that in any case.

Let's say that it's significantly more likely that you have practised on a variety of easy to hard problems in your field of interest if you have taken good courses from a university versus doing your own work. I believe that when you pick your own homework, it's natural to cherry-pick problems that seem simple.

> I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field.

That would (and does) describe research divisions in industry too.

It's not a soo strong opinion. There are definitely people who learn a lot from lectures, I've seen a lot of them, but there are also a lot of people who don't like lectures and feel they learn nothing in it and learn quite fast alone at home. The last one is mostly me. (for context, i have a PhD in AI).

Completely agree. Intelligence alone is not sufficient (perhaps not even always necessary) to learn a new field. People really need experts to let them know when they're wrong until they develop the discipline to recognize it for themselves.

This is very domain-specific. It makes total sense in STEM, but is more debatable in the arts and humanities - where it seems you learn whatever specific style of writing, practice, and critical analysis is popular in academia at the time, and you're going to have a bad time if you try to step out of that.

Even there, if your goal is to learn to write in that currently preferred style, your odds are much better if you have someone who can point out when you deviate from it.

>It can also take significantly less time. I'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays

It's actually one of the worst ways of learning.

It may be anecdotal, but I've found that I learn faster and retain more while actively working on something new that compares to a lecture.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...

I'm the same way and have always been. The only time I got anything from lectures in college was when I had an extraordinarily gifted professor (inventor of the EMP bomb) teach electromagnetic field theory. Awesome lecture, beautiful math, too bad I used approximately zero of it later on. But at least I enjoyed it.

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