Beware the self-taught know it all | Hacker News Reader

Beware the self-taught know it all

blog.acthompson.net

16 pointsAlfred29 comments

I am absolutely overflowing with computer science PhDs from IBM, CA, and academia. I would give away 10 pompous entitled know-it-all Computer Science PhD types for just one single self-taught know-it-all. Maybe the real problem is that your over-achieving self-taught know-it-all types are unchallenged and agitated by your basic curriculum. Maybe the education system in this country is so abysmally broken, that professors waste their time criticizing talented students on the Internet, while those talented students sit unchallenged in boring basic classes they should not have to take in the first place.

Chill out a bit. Classes are for more people than the self-taught know-it-all's in the room. Most of those people attend the class because they want to learn the "basic curriculum" and they probably aren't interested in listening to some self-taught guy argue with the professor.

The author of the article is not condemning people for being self-taught; he's condemning them for being arrogant. I would self-identify as a self-taught know-it-all and understand the behavior he's talking about in the article: pointing out minor inaccuracies in things the professor says, answering every question (to the exclusion of others being able to answer), and asking irrelevant "questions" largely just to demonstrate how much better you are than the other students. It's really not that hard to realize that this behavior is disruptive and avoid it.

Arrogance is a disruptive personality characteristic whether the individual is an academoc or self-taught, and no one likes a know-it-all of any type. However, the behaviors you describe are extremely common among gifted and talented individuals, and are part of the reason that such individuals often struggle in the general student population (and real life). Often that talent, enthusiasm, and zest for sharing knowledge that these people possess is interpreted as arrogance. It's no excuse for the behavior - clearly quirky talented types must live in society - but it does mean that the education system should account for these individuals and help them down the road. But it doesn't. The system fails miserably in this regard, and the author of this article needs to realize he is part of the problem.

One tendency of the arrogantly self-taught that the poster didn't mention is that they don't know what they don't know (and aren't willing to learn, because they know it all already). Even though the majority of the course is well below their competence level, they miss out on some critical foundational things, but persist in their arrogance.

As an illustrative example, I was a graduate TA for an undergrad algorithms course this term. I spent two days after the course ended arguing about the final assignment grade with one of these self-taught know-it-alls - the problem was a dynamic programming problem which could be solved in quadratic time, and which the student had solved recursively in exponential time. He repeatedly insisted that his solution was "mostly correct", and that he should get some points for it, and I explained three times the theoretical reasons why he was wrong. Eventually I also pointed out that his solution was about one trillion times slower than my reference solution on an instance of size 50 (mine ran imperceptibly fast, his hit the 30 second timeout) - I don't even know the words for how much slower it was on the largest test case (of size 2000).

Students like that may have talent, but without the humility to realize they have something to learn from others, I'm sure they'll end up putting code like that in production and costing their employers real money.

It's the gaping holes in their knowledge base, reinforced work-arounds in place because they didn't know there was a gap or that it could be bridged, which I find glaringly problematic. Formal training strives to ensure everything has been covered to an appropriate degree, and subsequent self-teaching is done with an awareness that such thoroughness should be sought. The self-taught know-it-all (as contrasted with self-taught humility) does not grasp the vast fabric of knowledge, instead equating "good enough" with "that's all there is".

On the other hand, the computer scientist might still be fiddling with trying to achieve the "correct" architecture long after the self taught guy's software is in production, and earning money.

Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship’s logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. This ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship’s processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.

The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship’s sensors couldn’t see that there was a hole, and the supervisors, which should have said that the sensors weren’t working properly, weren’t working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain - which would have enabled it to see the hole - with them.

- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

To wit: gaping holes in one's understanding can be chronically problematic when what should be in the gaping hole includes that which lets one know that there is, in fact, a gaping hole. One may be capable of proceeding nonetheless (resulting in the rest of the quoted-from book), but with great difficulty.

Of course, arguing over whether Stupid A is stupider than Stupid B is stupid. Better to be neither the self-taught dysfunctional nor the fully-trained dysfunctional. TFA wasn't condemning the self-taught, it was condemning the arrogant self-taught who don't, can't, and won't recognize that there may be a better and simpler way.

I see the same thing crop up on HN so often - this whole "I taught myself and it works, therefore we should abandon universities and all self-teach". Here's one of these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6176222

I taught myself and I believe it works for me.

My 2 attempts at going to university ended up being noise with little signal and I dropped out after building up some depression due to that. I had the similar issues with prior schooling and turns out building products with others seems to be the most effective way to learn for me.

It may very well not be the case for everyone so universities have their place, but there were many other flaws in the small subset I've experienced that should be fixed before I consider recommending them.

I also still have friends from that university, and most of them had to learn to self teach as soon as they got out.

So I think... in Computer Science, some people going to universities should self teach instead or find a better university. Showing childrens to teach themselves at an early age and having a school system supporting it could also be a good improvement for the future.

In your quote, the 'all' is probably an over-statement. But more people could give it a try.

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