Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference

Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference(autodidactic.com)

49 points by pogos 16 years ago | 33 comments

dagw 16 years ago |

It seems like a number of people on that list are authors and artists. Those are fields where university education has never really been of any significance. It would be more interesting to see a list with those and similar professions removed.

Secondly a couple of them are very dubious,for example Chuck Yeager didn't attend college, but calling him self educated is a bit of a stretch as it ignores all the training and education he got in the military.

electromagnetic 16 years ago | |

I remember when I worked as a reviewer, I was told by multiple editors that they took people on because of the 'personal voice' in their writing. One linked me to an interview with one of the top editors in the UK, who simply stated: anyone applying for a job, with a degree in journalism on their resume anywhere above the bottom of their list of job experience will have the paper thrown out.

Since 'New Journalism' entered the market it has decimated colleges and universities abilities to produce journalists. Simply put, personal voice cannot be taught and paying for an education in journalism is a major waste of time that could be spent starting at the bottom. I was taken on as a reviewer at 16 as I had the ability to make my editor laugh. I was admittedly rough in the beginning, but being a combination of a fast learner and willing to learn meant I was turned around quickly and was writing the best reviews.

An editor's job is to recognize talent and save the newbie's asses along the way. Once an editor teaches a new journalist the right style and what they're looking for, any talented journalist will barely need any editing. I know by the end of my stint as a reviewer my editor basically only had to say 'yes' or 'no' to an article and I'd have it rewritten in an hour or two to how he wanted it.

j_baker 16 years ago | |

What makes you say that? Of course college education is important to authors and artists. Of course, I would bet that it's easier to make it in those fields without a degree than in programming.

dagw 16 years ago | | |

Obviously any educations is helpful, but getting published without a degree isn't anywhere near as impressive as getting a job as a lawyer or research scientist without a university degree.

mml 16 years ago | |

I know many self-taught "software engineers". Most, if not all of them spend a great deal of time training BS-CSCI holders how to make a living out of their science. Many of the best programmers I've worked with didn't even start, much less finish college.

If disrespecting the likes of Major General Chuck Yeager (who can still kick Chuck Norris's ass) makes you feel better about your student loans, more power to you.

dagw 16 years ago | | |

What? Where the hell did I disrespect Chuck Yeager? I have nothing but the utmost respect for the man. All I said was that he isn't a self taught pilot. He was in the military and the military trained him. Why is saying that disrespectful or in any way lessening the amazing things he's achieved.

noarchy 16 years ago |

A lot of the people on that list at least went to college. It was a lot easier to get away with this back then, whereas today no one will even look at you unless you have a diploma of some kind (in most fields, at least). I am far more impressed with the ones who never even started, or who never even finished the equivalent of high school.

A good number of people on the list are entrepreneurs, too. Even today, you can get away with having far less formal education if you strike out on your own.

Locke1689 16 years ago | |

Agreed. The very fact that Bill Gates and Paul Allen both attended Harvard meant that they got some of the benefit. They certainly weren't complete autodidacts -- they got some of the best secondary education in the country beforehand.

teilo 16 years ago |

I have a degree in theology from an unaccredited school, and I tell people that my "degree" is unaccredited any time I am interviewed, so as to avoid any possibility of being accused of fraud.

I make almost all my money in IT, for which I have had no formal training of any kind. I've done free-lance programming, unix administration, network installations, etc. Some was freelance contract work. At one point, I was an employee of one of the largest mortgage securitization companies (at the time), in charge of application packaging and distribution, laptop certification and 3rd tier hardware support of the same. I am now a CTO of a smaller company. I doubt my lack of an accredited degree would prevent me from getting a job almost anywhere in the field where I was qualified.

But I never trash someone who got a traditional degree. For most people, it is necessary to get past the gatekeepers.

davidw 16 years ago |

For bonus points, extract the names, get the years when they lived, and plot them with simile timeplot or something similar. It seems to me that a lot of them were born in the 1800's, but maybe I'm wrong.

Donald 16 years ago | |

1600 - 1699: 2

1700 - 1799: 18

1800 - 1899: 79

1900 - 1999: 58

Still, given the population explosion, it's unlikely that there were fewer autodidacts in the 20th century than in the 19th.

Raw data: http://pastie.org/783067

og1 16 years ago | | |

Also consider the set of people born 1950 onward. They will not be included because they are on the cusp of being famous and haven't gone through their entire careers yet.

mahmud 16 years ago | | |

Excellent scraping there. The figure you want is just the first number, the birth year. The number 1999 is meaningless, it's not a birth year, but the year Stanley Kubrick died. You want \((\\d+)-

tel 16 years ago | | |

Drawing conclusions from the data is misleading. The original set is not comprehensive and any human trends you might look for are surely obscured by uncontrolled variation.

davidw 16 years ago | | |

College access is far broader in the 20th century, though, too, especially from the 50'ies onwards; at least in the US.

ivenkys 16 years ago |

And the master himself says :

Terry Pratchett: "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did"

electromagnetic 16 years ago | |

As an aspiring novelist, if Pratchett can do it without an A-level, surely I can do it with a moderate pass!

I'm personally eternally grateful that I reneged from going to university. In that time I've emigrated, got married and I've worked real jobs that have given me tons of worldly experience, all of which has helped my writing immensely. All of which would never have happened at university. I would have been the same super-geek I had in highschool who was afraid to talk to any girl I didn't know. Now, I'm no longer cliched and formulaic . . . which I suppose is a great place to be for any writer!

radu_floricica 16 years ago |

The issue is not the instruction you get at an university, but the environment. If obesity is contagious, education is so much more so.

fauigerzigerk 16 years ago | |

For those who need to be infected that may be true sometimes. But to go to university you have to endure 12 or 13 years of school where everything imaginable is done to stifle any interest you may have had before.

radu_floricica 16 years ago | | |

We're not ideal superhumans. For any one of us, being in a stimulating environment makes us better. And a library unfortunately doesn't provide it. Not that books aren't a good companion at any time.

Locke1689 16 years ago |

This misses one of the more important roles of a degree. The degree isn't to show you that you know what you're doing, it's to show everyone else that you know what you're doing.

Whether or not that ends up being true is something else, but I tend to believe that you get out of a good university what you put into it.

j_baker 16 years ago |

Keep in mind that I say this as a person who's mostly self-educated. There is an alternative point of view: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-w...

In this blog post, the argument is that bigger companies hire people with college degrees precisely because it's a pointless hazing ritual. Granted, that isn't applicable to startups, but there is a reason for a lot of companies to only hire people with college degrees.

pmikal 16 years ago |

CEO's without college education http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/766831.html

Wanted: CEO, no Ivy required http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover-ceos_x....

...seems like a bachelor's degree is a requirement for big company management.

martythemaniak 16 years ago | |

"The only CEO of the top-50, whose education is listed as n/a is Martin J Sullivan, the CEO of AIG,"

Pretty funny if you ask me.

GHFigs 16 years ago |

There isn't much to learn from reading a list like this. Skip the list. Go make a difference.

j_baker 16 years ago | |

Motivation to make a difference is a big help. Otherwise, people might believe that they're worthless simply because they don't have a piece of paper from a college.

GHFigs 16 years ago | | |

The list doesn't tell you anything though. It's a pat on the back for making a decision irrespective of whether it is the right one for you, and it doesn't tell you anything about how any of those people actually achieved anything.

We all love identifying with famous people that we admire, but make no mistake: these people all lived very different lives, and each had a host of reasons why apparent lack of credentials did not get in the way of their notoriety which are unique to them. Reasons which you cannot conjure just by reading a list.

Some were born at the right time or to the right parents. Some had extraordinary luck. Some spent most of their lives languishing in obscurity, poverty, misery, or Actual Work. Some were in fact quite well-educated, if not college graduates. Joseph Campbell actually had an M.A. from Columbia. George Washington had family connections and owned slaves. Eric Hoffer spent his whole life doing manual labor. These things are relevant to framing the relationship between their self-education and notoriety.

You're not worthless without a degree, but neither are you Einstein, Faulkner, Hemmingway, Tesla, or Benjamin Franklin, and you won't become more like them by hearing about their accomplishments again. Maybe most people understand that, but I've fallen into that trap enough times over the years to want to post a warning where I can.

I had started to get into this in my comment but left it out for the sake of clarity, because my point, ultimately, is as I said: there isn't much to learn from reading a list like this.

themanual 16 years ago |

NOTE: Most of the people in the list are before 1900. So that is old school :)

fauigerzigerk 16 years ago | |

Yes, but count again in 100 years when those born after, say, 1970 have had a chance to become famous.

snitko 16 years ago |

Excellent list, I was wondering if someone bothered to make it.

lnp 16 years ago | |

This is a valid use case for a semantic search engine, let's try: http://powerset.com/explore/go/self%252Deducated-scientist

Mz 16 years ago |

I've done a little reading over the years and thought about this some. I think this argument occurs in some form in every age. But when new fields are born, there is no place to go to get educated in it. You just have to make it up. And it is in the birth of those new things that people are more likely to be seen as "making a difference". Entrepreneurship also involves making it up as you go. I've read some things that indicate that finishing your education can be an impediment to making it as an entrepreneur. The two examples I usually refer to: Bill Gates and Madonna are both college drop outs.

If you want to become a doctor, yes, you need all the credentials that society requires. But if you just want to help people get healthier, there are many paths to such a goal. I considered becoming a physical therapist when I was a teen. But I did an informational interview and concluded they didn't really do what I was imagining. A lot of people have fantasies about some career or other only to find it doesn't really do what they had imagined. Tragically, for many people this realization comes after investing a lot of time, money and effort into getting the requisite education, experience and credentials. At that point, a lot of people feel stuck: They have student loans to pay off and can't make enough money doing something else to pay them.

I was interested in this question (concerning credentials and success) in part because I homeschooled my kids. I always told them that they would have no king's stamp to make the gold good, therefore they actually had to be gold -- ie they have to be able to Bring It. They are fine with that.