

Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference - pogos
http://www.autodidactic.com/profiles/profiles.htm

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dagw
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.

~~~
j_baker
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
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.

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noarchy
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
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.

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teilo
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.

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davidw
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
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
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.

------
ivenkys
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
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!

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radu_floricica
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
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
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.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
You're implying that schools are a stimulating environment. For me they were
the exact opposite and universities perpetuate the same mind numbing system.

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Locke1689
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.

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j_baker
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...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-
degree-to-work-for-bigco.html)

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.

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pmikal
Related:

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....](http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover-ceos_x.htm)

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

~~~
martythemaniak
"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.

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

~~~
j_baker
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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Mz
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.

