Experiments in Autodidacticism

[luka]

having said that i waste my own time in even more useless and unimaginative ways. life is, at root, an exercise in wasting time.

 

[Murphy]

For posterity, primarily. But also as an occasion to more crisply formalize things, and perhaps even pique the interest of the other inhabitants of this bitspace.

For over two years now I have been experimenting with autodidactic education, here conceived as an education in which the student determines their own practice and curriculum.

To define autodidactic as self-taught I think brings up semantic problems. I am not independently reproducing the sequences of discoveries over the course of science, but rather being taught about them by various digitally preserved expert personae. What makes this approach different from conventional education is not that one is teaching oneself, but that one is guiding oneself.

But only two weeks ago I began adhering to a more formal schedule, one designed to keep various topics active, in the manner of crop rotation, and to optimize around associations between topics.

One of the main beliefs driving this project is that, to the extent that knowledge is embodied in neuronal connections, better integration across such networks may result in a more robust and enduring body of knowledge. Part science and part gnosis, this premise, that one may willfully impact, to some extent, the interconnectedness and integration of neural networks and, by extension, extend the longevity of a body of knowledge that would otherwise be of too unwieldy a breadth to maintain.

And so the first biweekly schedule goes:



With each daily entry as following:






The working goal of reflections is to single out points of progress and points of uncertainty to make progress on. I wish to establish a more robust method for maximally deriving knowledge from each session and integrating this knowledge across topics.

For this first two-week cycle, I averaged right around 3 hours per day of didactic video material. My aim is to get to six hours, implementing a new two-topic triweekly schedule, with the primary topic receiving four hours of more or less undivided attention, and the secondary topic receiving two.

The goal here is to both expand the breadth of topics even further, and to spread out the focus on each topic from one day every two weeks to two days every three weeks:



In broadest terms, the goal is to systematically amass and integrate an incredible breadth of knowledge, to eventually be operationalized in the effort of optimizing the fabric of human existence.

The paradigm for this phase of education is itself dynamic, with each successive cycle liable to be restructured and iteratively optimized in a radically experimental fashion.

sounds like a plan, I read elsewhere a post where you outlined your lecture viewing for last year, something an accredited enrolled course simply can’t compete with because you’re behind the wheel (+ fees)

on the other hand I don’t see YT as covering enough bases long term, eventually you have to bride out into journals

a rational response to an insane, freak-show world, just be watchful where it leads

 

[Clinamenic]

sounds like a plan, I read elsewhere a post where you outlined your lecture viewing for last year, something an accredited enrolled course simply can’t compete with because you’re behind the wheel (+ fees)

on the other hand I don’t see YT as covering enough bases long term, eventually you have to bride out into journals

a rational response to an insane, freak-show world, just be watchful where it leads

Right on about the journals, probably where'll I'll have to turn when I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for youtube in terms of technicality. Thankfully, enough seems to be free. For the time being, I'm still novice in most of these areas, entering intermediacy in a couple, so Youtube is plentiful for now.

A poignant warning, one I'll have to keep in mind.

 

[Clinamenic]

what youre engaged in is a hunt for metaphor and homology and isomorphism rather than an earnest attempt to master any of these particular disciplines. which is cool. but also maybe a waste of time.

The term "social stratum" is itself clearly a metaphor, involving the idea that, just as geological strata are layers of rocky materials stacked on top of each other, so classes and castes are layers some higher, some lower-of human materials. Is it possible to go beyond metaphor and show that the genesis of both geological and social strata involves the same engineering diagram? Geological strata are created by means of (at least) two distinct operations. When one looks closely at the layers of rock in an exposed mountainside, one is struck by the observation that each layer contains further layers, each composed of pebbles that are nearly homogeneous with respect to size, shape, and chemical composition.

Yes, but to an extent this hunt for homology is a means for tying together otherwise unwieldy and cumbersome chunks of information in ways that may better integrate it all. More gnostically it is somewhat of a hunt for the source code of logos, some sufficiently universal practice that can be applied to advancing in any discursive direction.

Mastering any one of these usually takes a (normal) lifetime, so any hope I have of mastering more than one is critically dependent on some radical epistemic innovation.

 

[DannyL]

I have a loose untested theory that a human life is just long enough to master a field - can often be done by middle age. I think of some mates who know everything about a certain genre of music - they achieved a near complete understanding of that genre and it's history and any new discoveries will just be slotted in alongside that.

 

[Clinamenic]

There was a macroeconomic lecture I watched yesterday that was well beyond my comprehension, providing so little for my intuition to grasp ahold of that I found my attention more prone to slide away from the material.

Seeing as so many fo these disciplines extend into such technical areas, I may assume there will virtually always be some choice of material that will be beyond my comprehension, a sort of bar to position overhead as a checkpoint, or at least a point of reference.

It brought to mind an analogy that may be of some use, in terms of curating the curriculum to include some material that is beyond my comprehension, which I have already been doing albeit more arbitrarily.

The too-technical material beyond my comprehension is the fuel, the insight is the oxygen, and the motivation is the heat, together comprising the three factors necessary for sustained combustion. In this analogy, the burnt material is that which my intuition can traverse to some extent, however intensely.

 

[Clinamenic]

I have a loose untested theory that a human life is just long enough to master a field - can often be done by middle age. I think of some mates who know everything about a certain genre of music - they achieved a near complete understanding of that genre and it's history and any new discoveries will just be slotted in alongside that.

Yes I don;t want mastery to go understated in this project. Like you I assume, I'd prefer to place a high premium on mastery, which warrants quite the substantiation.

In light of that, this project is quixotic at best, insane at worst.

Then why do it? At a deeper level, it is really a field-testing of a philosophy, which was largely the intellectual point of departure:

Progress as an end in itself, which makes the actual feasibility of the goal a secondary concern. In fact, the goal becomes mutable when progress itself is really the aim. In this framework, otherwise unviable goals, in terms of sustainable motivation, become viable, as mere occasions to make progress.

 

[Clinamenic]

From that premise, such a galactic curriculum may be set out upon.

 

[Clinamenic]

If you follow the logic of the premise just a bit further, you may conclude that it is actually better to set unrealistically ambitious goals, just to afford a virtually infinite opportunity for progress.

 

[Clinamenic]

If you follow the logic of the premise just a bit further, you may conclude that it is actually better to set unrealistically ambitious goals, just to afford a virtually infinite opportunity for progress.

Hence the wider goal stated in the original post: to optimize the fabric of human existence.

 

[Clinamenic]

To try to connect this to something scientific, the indefinite progress being made on this project may perhaps be quantifiable in terms of how meeting daily quotas may prompt certain emotional responses, or evoke a certain satisfaction.

How that is actually quantified is presently beyond me, but I do know that certain neurotransmitters in certain circuitous arrangements are evidentially associated with certain affective states.

 

[Clinamenic]

A constantly changing paradigm in which quotas are defined may also aid in keeping things interesting, mitigating any drop-off in satisfaction experienced in an otherwise static framework.

 

[line b]

 

[Clinamenic]

Stunning, a circular metabolism, iterative distillation, etc.

 

[Clinamenic]

A valuable metaphysical lesson for that child.

 

[line b]

 

[william_kent]

taken to its logical conclusion:

A 34-year-old white male found dead in the basement of his home died of suffocation, according to police. He was approximately 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 225 pounds. He was wearing a pleated skirt, white bra, black and white saddle shoes, and a woman's wig. It appeared that he was trying to create a schoolgirls uniform look. He was also wearing a military gas mask that had the filter canister removed and a rubber hose attached in its place. The other end of the hose was connected to a one end of a hollow wooden tube approx. 12 inches long and 3inches in diameter. The tubes other end was inserted into his rectum for reasons unknown, and was the cause of his suffocation.

Police found the task of explaining the circumstances of his death to his family very awkward.

 

[Clinamenic]

This thread is yielding feedback of an unforeseen character.

 

[Clinamenic]

Perhaps its the word autodidact.

 

[Clinamenic]

And the word experiment.