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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of "The King's Speech". A competent quack isn't necessarily an oxymoron. As a self-taught programmer that's encouraging.

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I don't think he was a quack, he wasn't selling anything counterfactual or deceptive. He was outside the mainstream, but more in the sense of a specialist than a fraudster. And his novel funding model allowed care when none else could be afforded.

> he wasn't selling anything counterfactual or deceptive

He was saying he is a physician, and by all evidence he wasn't. That's both deceptive and counterfactual.

I think 6,500 alive babies is probably a better credential then a diploma on a wall.

That is the “competent” part from the “competent quack”.

Obviously if we can believe his numbers, that is.

Doesn’t make it not strictly fraudulent.

Don’t worry, the world will never lack for Great Bureaucrats to tut-tut 6500 babies irregularly saved, and to regulate away the likelihood of such atrocities happening on the regular.

So many of the best programmers I have worked with are self taught! The key is if they keep learning as they go, because self education can skip some theory, and every changes too.

Somewhere along the way CS became really popular so you'd get people with nice credentials and zero passion to do the actual work. Let's fight that paper ceiling.

I’d go further and say that writing code for a living requires a great deal of self-teaching regardless of your background. CS degrees typically don’t teach you how to build software, and even if they did, the problem space is huge. There is a lifetime of self-teaching to do from the moment you take your first job.

I think that my being self-taught helped my career quite a bit. It did make it harder to get in the door, but that was just a one-time problem to solve.

It's really amazing how back then people could just come to the US and completely reinvent themselves. William Mulholland was a poor Irish kid with almost no education who became a self-taught engineer and completely reshaped the future of Los Angeles. Stuff like that just can't happen anymore.

> Stuff like that just can't happen anymore.

Ya sure about that? You can be a fraudster in the UK, have your medical degree revoked, and go to the US as a fraudster without a medical degree... And be a leader!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

People forget that all doctors were quacks (to borrow your meaning, loosely) until 1847 when the AMA was founded to promote medical licensing; and/or until Flexner’s report to Congress that there were too many unlicensed doctors not using enough pharmaceuticals (1910), the standardization of allopathic medicine and founding of the Federation of State Medical Boards (1912)

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