Credentialing and Self-education
At some point education must be self-directed and yet it requires peers.
As access to quality information becomes cheaper and almost ubiquitous, an interesting consequence appears clear. Anyone can learn almost anything online and the limiting factor for education is accreditation centers. The Accreditation part I will cover it next, I was planning on doing it today, but someone just raised the bar of what a post should be on Steemit.
TL;DR This post is about:
- Credentialing as seen by a tech mogul (Naval Ravitank), who sees it as gatekeeping from meritocracy.
- Me wondering if that's true, why is there's no current alternative in Math or Physics (which I say is probably due to more than merely credentialing)
- An idea of how one could go about creating a self-made curriculum
- Me saying we are far from replacing credentialling
Problems with Self-Education
One of my favorite Twitter accounts, @naval is the one by Naval Ravikant CEO of AngelList a widely successful VC. He recently posted on education.
If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. Ycombinator made $Bs doing this for young founders. The more MERITOCRATIC an industry, the faster it moves away from false credentialing. I.e., the MBA and tech startups. A generation of auto-didacts, educated by the Internet & leveraged by technology, will eventually starve the industrial-education system. Until then, only the most desperate and talented students will make the leap. Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Educational credentials are badges that admit one to the elite class. Expect elites to struggle mightily to justify the current system. Eventually, the tide of the Internet and rational, self-interested employers will create and accept efficient credentialing... and wash away our obsolete industrial-education system.
Two points gained my attention. One was credentialing, as someone that has been in self-education most of my life and is part of a field protected by credentialing as is medicine. Two was the meritocratic nature of MBA's and Tech start-ups.
At the beginning of my reconsideration of what meritocracy is, and about meritocracy in STEM, I found this article as my first option of search in google, titled "Once and for all: Tech is not a meritocracy", the article was mainly about social barriers for certain groups of people to advance in tech and although it could be true, is not what I was expecting.
Nothing stops you from creating the million dollars app or protocol regardless of your age or background, from starting a business and getting rich. Maybe that's where the highest stakes are and the reason for such high meritocracy a VC likeRavitank claims. But made me wonder, If this is true then I want to know how meritocratic and away from credentialing STEM fields are.
Probably the smartest people you'll ever meet are in the Physics and Maths department. Can you really turn yourself into a Physicist or Mathematician on your own just with the internet? What would a system of "credentialing" look like ?
Even when subjects like Physics and Mathematics can be highly theoretical, how come one doesn't see more self-directed success from these fields. You will always find "geniuses" or motivated self-learners but what about the big majority.
Feedback
The biggest problem at the moment I presume is lack of good feedback. Roughly speaking, borrowing from biology there are two kinds of feedback: Negative and Positive
A negative feedback is a process that allows Homeostasis 
by sending a signal to the source an decreasing the input till an equilibrium is set. The body temperature in the hypothalamus is controlled by a complex negative feedback system to maintain the temperature in a controlled range, not too high or not too low.
A Positive feedback 
on the other hand, amplifies a signal until the resources in the system exponentially until the input and resources have been exhausted. This is, for instance, the case of childbirth, where the baby pushed the pelvis this increase stimulates the production of oxytocin, that makes the contractions stronger pushing the baby down even more, until the baby is out, normally.
Wanna know how to study on your own to become a Physicist? here's a resource for Physics by a Nobel awarded physicist. 
https://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/classmech.html
Wanna give it a try?
This is my opinion on how it could be done. I would like to contribute in the future to create such a world but I think is far away,
This is a way to do it: "How to"
The most effective way is finding and following the Flow. University is a two faced beast there to guide us by “standardized” (lectures, assignments, problem sets and EXAMS), so we don’t fool ourselves, and “Peers” who are there to motivate us and be our mirrors as a negative feedback, because they can see your flaws more easily than you (also to network but it can be achieved as easily somewhere else, a skill on its own: Churches, political activism or dancing are far more effective, for instance) So let me address how you could supplement those two incredibly important missing pieces by using the OCW as your partial guide.
Now, for something to be effective is necessary to first determine a goal and judge the process based on such a goal. Without a goal set in stone, all work is meaningless and deemed as a failure when lost from sight. Set a plan and follow it without stopping until the end.
The more specific your goal the easier it will be to accomplish.
First things first: Basics.
There’s nothing more important than a strong foundation in the subject you are studying. Courses have requirements if you don’t fulfill them many opportunities to learn the subject will be lost without you realizing.
e.g. Let’s suppose your goal is to achieve a mastery of the subject comparable to that of the people who took the class by the end of a semester in the 75 percentile, as self-graded according to the rules in the syllabus… Let’s pick a course… Single Variable Calculus fall of 2007 from the MIT OCW. See? specific.
The prerequisites for this course are not stated in the OCW web page, unlike other more advanced subjects, since is assumed you should have that knowledge since high school. What now? You ask or read somewhere else what you should know and find that is actually trigonometry and algebra. How do you learn this or do you really need it? Now you need a test to find how good your basics are and if you are ready to take this course. In order to find such a test a good strategy is to find who are the most competitive people for this subject, in algebra and in trigonometry in the country (Remember you are taking a course in one of the best universities in the world to keep the bar set high). You probably could find that Math Olympiad medalists are the best and that a lot of them prepare by using a set of books and a webpage known as TheArtofProblem solving. They have diagnostic tests to know if you are ready for a subject.
Algebra: https://data.artofproblemsolving...
Precalculus: https://data.artofproblemsolving...
Geometry: https://data.artofproblemsolving...
If you can solve them easily proceed to the syllabus of the Calculus course in this supposition, another wise study those subjects first since you are not ready yet.
Since your circumstances are not the same as theirs (the people taking the course in person) you are at a serious disadvantage. Mainly because: A) You don’t have an incentive to focus your attention and follow the process until the end without quitting B) You have no peers to feedback on your current status in the course and your life C) You have no one to ask for help directly D) until you are finished you can never be sure if you want it enough.
To solve this here’s a possible way.
“Set a space exclusive for studying this subject in your personal space”. Take your laptop or tablet or phone to a place where you only study and do an activity to start class religiously. This could be a chair nothing more than a chair, but make sure you do nothing else with that chair. [This sets a particular state of mind, like a ritual. Since you are alone you are like an athlete and athletes know how important is to respect rituals for self-discipline]
“Write a diary at the end of the day and read it at the end of the week” The best option would be to share your experiences with someone who shares the same experience or a private tutor in person. Try to find one of those, but most likely you will not. Forums, YouTube comments, are good to ask questions but unless you can set something like a Skype partner you are alone. In science studying alone is not that rare, you are your best friend and to reevaluate yourself is good to have a perspective on how you are doing. Diaries are similar to what in science people call prospective studies. Historians take diaries really really seriously for this reason as evidence.
“Your book is your god, pray by solving problem sets”. Always remember you can ask specific questions about a problem set or publish your doubts in the OCW forums or here in Quora. But you must complete the assignments on your own. So whatever you must do read and read again your book to solve problems. After finishing a chapter take a blank piece of paper and without looking at the book write the subject until is finished in that previously blank piece of paper, like a presentation. keep those papers in a special place, the same place you will conserve unaltered your self-tests and self-exams. Whatever the result you must keep them and advance. Otherwise abandon immediately.
“Have fun” Remember, the videos and notes are guides and don’t cover the subject entirely. They are the least you should know for the future. If you don’t read on your own and solve the problems you will learn shit. You are free you can stop and abandon at any moment, is hard but the recompense is knowledge and fun.
Ready. Set…
Now is a moment to start. Go to the syllabus and print it. Next, go to the Calendar at the of the OCW page, modify it according to your personal requirements. This is your Schedule. Plan this carefully and print it. Most people don’t know how to do a schedule, so this is how: You write what you already do and optimize. Never write things as they should be. e.g. Put in your daily chores, your social life, your eating time, your sleeping time, your cat videos on YouTube. Whatever you already do, by the minute. Start from there to negotiate the free spaces in your schedule, there you are going to accommodate your study. Otherwise, you will fail. Don’t fight reality, negotiate. Let it in a visible spot in your study space, the place where you only study. Check and write in the syllabus the moment you start class and the moment you end class every day. I repeat, Plan this carefully but fast, you can not stop at the Calendar. “Plans are useless but planning is everything”
Get a folder for your finished scheduled assignments and your graded scheduled exams.
Get the textbook specified in the readings section. You are not paying for the university so the least you can do is buy the book. A used or old edition can do just fine. Also, print the supplemental material.
//According to the schedule, the first part is “recitation: Graphing - 0” that is missing in the videos. But present in the course reader// Don’t panic if the material is lost in a course. It will happen. This happens from time to time in person also. Sometimes people miss classes. If I do a quick search on google I find that some MIT courses have Teaching assistant lectures, known as recitations to help with the assignments. Like this one from a different year, still useful. Recitation Introduction for MIT 18.01SC, 18.02SC
If you can not find a resource, complete it quickly with something from somewhere else or if impossible ignore it and continue. Don’t cut the flow.
OK. Now we go to the first video lecture. Read the recommended section in your book before watching the lecture. Get your notebook and lecture notes ready from the OCW for that specific class. Write the hour you start the lesson in your schedule. Watch it from the OCW page to minimize distractions, not from YouTube; from start to finish without pausing or repeating sections. Don’t go back until the lesson is finished. This is extremely important. You must not cut the flow. If you missed something write when it happened and review it after you write in the syllabus and schedule the hour you ended the lesson. I can not emphasize enough how important this is. The video is a great thing for reviewing, but when listening to the lecture for the first time NEVER go back or cut the flow by pausing. Take notes.
Do the assignments as stated in the “assignments OCW page. Remember the people of OCW wrote those instructions for real people like you to follow them. This is it. This is the heart of the course. The most important things are those problems and the skills you develop by solving them. It might be an essay for other courses or something else but you learn by applying the recently acquired knowledge. This is an art and this is you. Whatever necessary is permitted. Complete your assignments by your own set day. If you do not complete this by your due date leave a piece of paper saying you didn’t complete it in the special place for your grades and grade accordingly. “An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes in his subject, and how to avoid them” W. Heisenberg. So fail fast and GLORIFY the worst mistakes you make in this sets, ask for the worst pitfalls to whomever you can ask help from.
Create a question bank. This is something M.Ds know thanks to the USMLE. Mock exams and question banks are what improve your grades. Turn your notes into questions and get some more from a friend or the internet. The purpose of questions is to refresh the memory to its maximum potential and teach your brain how to use that information on the spot. The review of the questions should be done in rapid-fire, without stopping to read what you had wrong. Flow.
Your memories get fixed on the stone during high-stress moments. So when you find that your knowledge of a subject is strong. Put yourself in a high-stress environment (High noise, distraction, time-limited) to fix it in your memory, we call this PIMPING. When learning a shaky subject, variate scenarios and find a low-stress environment, to avoid fixing your shakiness in your memory (quiet, focused, not limited by time).
Write in your diary your feelings, your doubts, your day.
Finally exams. Don’t advance a subject without full mastery. Print the exam, time yourself and grade it. If you failed, excelled or had a bad result doesn’t matter. Put it in a special place where you keep your grades. Now you can go and search other versions of this exam, review the subject and correct your gaps in knowledge or practice, quickly. Doing many exams is more important than reviewing. Name the exam as your second try, repeat until you can succeed. Keep the successful non-official repetitions in your notebook or your textbook, they are not the official grade.
University is there to guide us and test us in a standardized way so we don’t fool ourselves (lectures, assignments, problem sets and EXAMS). Peers are there to motivate us and be our mirrors.
Complete your schedule. The uninterrupted course of action that’s the Flow. If you failed, which I doubt if you followed the process, don’t repeat the course. Try something else to master this subject. regardless of the result after finishing treat your self for your effort.
Is a mere thought but true massive decentralization of credentialing is maybe years away. Who knows.
I'd say there are three main issues with auto-didactic, self driven education. (I say this as an autodidact.) First is self-motivation, which you covered heavily in your post. Second is, well, curation. The average person can't be expected to sort through all the crap on the internet to get to what they want, nor will they necessarily be able to distinguish the attractive bullshit from the boring truth without a hefty knowledgebase in their field already. Third- some fields, like geology, simply cannot be taught through a computer. They require far, far too much hands on experience and the conveying of knowledge that simply isn't passed down in books or the internet, but only between geologists. If all the geologists in the world died at once, there'd be no way to easily restart the field from books. Same with doctors and a bunch of other fields.
All that being said, I do everything I can to encourage auto-didactism in people. If you ever stop learning, what's the point?
There are many fields with apprenticeship like knowledge. Those are less susceptible to automation in the short term. Selected databases are something that is being constructed (initiatives like MIT's, Irvine's and Stanford's Open Course Wares, EDX, Coursera, Udemy, there are more and more and this will only advance, I myself I'm putting some work into it.
The motivation problem is one of gamification, that's a far more interesting problem but one that is also being solved as we speak by open source software. In my opinion, the biggest problem is quality, as Naval said, credentialing is there for a reason. That's what needs disruption.
I was raised Jewish, and you're not an adult in Judaism until you get your second college degree, as the old joke goes, so I'm a bit caught up in the credentialist system, despite my love of autodidactic learning. I think that ultimately some combination of the two systems will work best, but we'll see!
As for automation, I read a really interesting breakdown of what job types will be vulnerable to it, dividing jobs into 4 categories- routine manual, routine cognitive, non-routine manual, and non-routine cognitive. The routine jobs are already getting shredded by automation, and its only going to get worse. The non-routine jobs are actually increasing in demand.
You can always count on the Jewish people to do a great job at almost everything :) I'm a witness the joke rings true.
One can always expect Baumol's cost disease to kick in, so employment is not gonna be a problem. For instance, my profession is medicine, the probability of automation in the next 30 years is at 2%, being one of the lowest among their competitors.1 Nonetheless, that's merely at the surgical level. The biggest resistance to automation in diagnostic settings comes from doctor's notes. The archives are so poorly written that is one of the biggest barriers for A.I. to learn. Most of this barriers are due to artificial scarcity.
The need for specialized cognitive workers is gonna decrease by a lot in less than 5 years.
Although automation is another story, the thing is that while credentialling has served as a selection mechanism it makes less and less sense as information's value concentrates more on privacy than on existence. The big problem for disruption is how to assure quality, and that's a gamification problem that someone is bound to solve in the following years.
1 https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-jobs-automation-risk/
What about research science? It's about the most non-routine activity out there, and it's hard to imagine easily automating or even gamifying it- it simply requires too many new paradigms, new research methods, intuitive leaps, the invention of new tools and measurement standards, etc, etc for me to easily believe that another, gamified Feyerabrandian system might replace it. (Admittedly, as a future research scientist, I might be deluding myself- always a risk.)
Again, automation is not what this post is about. Is about
About your comment:
we are speaking on a gamified platform whose incentives have economic consequences on the real world, that was not possible even 2 years ago. Most questions about automation are problems of "when" not "if", is a consequence of the principles of universal Turing computation.
How secure is research in one or several areas? well, I don't know and nobody knows, but one thing seems sure. Things will change.
Ah, my bad, I keep using automation language. Sorry, seem to have gottenstuck in a wee mental rut there for a sec. On the purely credentialist front Feyerabend makes even more sense to discuss- he wanted to grant the public more control of and more access to science. I personally don't think it's a great idea- look how susceptible the public is to anti-vaxxer ideology, flat-earther ideas, and even just old myth like the "you only use 10% of your brain." The current credential system (the university) for science does a decent job at weeding those most vulnerable to those ideas and that sort of anti-scientific rhetorical manipulation.
hmm, I think the self motivation has to come from really being passionate and loving a subject, but even then you need structure and organiational skills. I lack those lol, but I study and make Steemit posts about what I study because of the insentive on here, and because I love it!
I think one of the most important parts of self studying is curation, and finding good sources. It is a skill, and often not easy. It can be really annoying too. However, it is important and rewarding. If you get your material from multiple sources, then you can contrast and compare!
Thirdy, as for hands on experience, this can be solved by networking. It isnt easy either, and often takes some time to set up. As a young person, I find going to events related to those subjects, even hanging out at universities and especially making friends with older people are very important. I am learning permaculture and mural painting just by networking with some older folks who love to talk!
Always learning! I think Ima make a post about self studying sooner then later.
You definitely should!
Honestly, some of my best self-driven learning has arisen from school- books mentioned or recommended by my professors, or research into topics only brushed over in class.
Indeed, I will get into it. it is something I love very much!
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
I like you more by the day, bot
We all love some lil AI/bot, breaks up the monotony of having to deal with humans :)
This is a lovely article! I like the idea of it, and I think education should be free and open sourced. I was lucky enough to be homeschooled by myself in an awesome program where I got a set of PLOs for a subject and then had to design my own course, projects and sources from there all by myself.
Through this I have gained a lot of confidence in self-studying. I will not take a university course unless I can audit it, and maybe a college course if it is interesting and cheap. I know that I can learn anything from the internet, from the library and from people in real life, and since I am already living an alternative lifestyle I do not need the credentials.
Although, I am studying everything but math! I def need a teacher for math because it is not my strong subject to say the least lol. I can excell at everything else, but leave math to the people who like math!
My biggest hope is an Open source math resource. Is quite difficult but it could happen. I don't know if education should be free and open source but we have the means to try and make it better and cheaper, by a lot.
Have you heard of Khan Academy? It is useful for basic math skills, I am not sure how advanced it gets because I am still trying to hone the basic skills lol.
I think that as it stands now, most people need to be able to make money off of teaching what they know, so it is hard for it to be free and open. However, as society transitions to a giving and sharing economy (that is the hope at least) we will be able to share and gift our knowledge freely! For those of us who want to learn and teach as a lifestyle, this would be ideal.
The more we share, the more we grow and learn together!
At the very least, we can make it better and cheaper right now, and move towards that ideal world where everyone can share without fearing for their survival or resources!
I'm familiar with Khan Academy. It has served many people and that is amazing. Unfortunately is not quite as in-depth as one would wish.
Most physics programmes complain about the lack of depth that freshman students arrive with at universities. Does everyone need to be a physics? no, but it shows how mismanaged are the expectations in high school.
It would be great if the incentives were aligned for a bigger portion of the population to advance without getting lost. That's the first step, a compass.
Thanks for passing by :)
Indeed, maybe with the rise of the internet and innovative people such as those here on Steemit, including yourself, physics and math will become more accesible to the average person!
very nice and very useful. may I be friends with you and study with you
I hope you find something of what I write useful in any way.