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I love researching stuff. If you were to peer into my apartment on an average, boring weekend evening there's a good chance you'll see me reading about something. Sometimes, more than I'd like, it's researching the next overly fancy and definitely not necessary piece of consumer technology. Other times, it's just reading about something new and interesting. Sometimes practical, maybe something related to computer science that I can apply at work, or perhaps some cooking advice I'll experiment withlater in the evening.

I love that we live in time where this is possible. The fact that we can do this is entirely thanks to the internet. It's an often overused phrase, but we really do live in the information age; any piece of information is essentially just a few seconds of effort away. It can be pretty addicting, especially when you're on the trail of something really really juicy.

Of course, to the delight of textbook manufacturers and curriculum designers this does not come anywhere close to replacing traditional education. At the younger grades you certainly need a teacher in the room not just to teach, but also to captivate your focus and keep you invested. Even older grades where classes are much more knowledge based benefit a lot from having a person in the room who can answer tricky questions and meet students halfway when they're stuck.

I do happen to believe that a small minority of people, those who are exceptionally dedicated and focused, can potentially benefit more from self learning then a structured college curriculum. You always hear people complain about "why do we need to even learn this?", and if something took the initiative they could maybe teach themselves the equivalent of a degree without paying a cent. Even just the fact that this is theoretically possible with nothing but an internet connection and time is an incredible success compared to the world that our parents inhabited.

I don't really think I'm quite at that level, having benefited a lot from my time in a traditional university even if it was just for the social aspect. Seriously, don't underestimate the motivational power of learning with others who are struggling through the same battles as you are. Thanks to that foundation, however, I now feel much more confident about my ability to self study other, similar areas of knowledge. I feel like I could take any university level computer science or math topic and entirely self study it to a satisfactory level. It feels pretty good.

It means I generally feel that I can comfortably avoid misinformation in any adjacent topic; make choices in these domain without worrying about being swindled by scammers and salesmen. When I see something that I'm unsure about I can easily verify it by going directly to the source and evaluating it myself. If I want to expand into new and related fields, I have the intellectual maturity and necessary background to just open up a textbook or technical paper and start reading.

The thing that I really wonder is how true this is for other, unrelated areas. How effectively could I come up to functional speed when dealing with complex problem in a completely novel domain? Problem customers are often infamous for doing "their own research", the extent of which might cover consulting doctor Google or asking professor chatGPT before discarding an expert's opinion. I don't want to end up as one of those people, but surely I can do better, right?

What I'd really like to know is whether it's fair to say that I could probably figure some stuff out with the right approach. If I had a medical or a legal issue, for example, that doesn't mean I could just spend fifteen minutes on Google and then considering the problem solved. However if you devoted a few hours to a few days on focused, intense research then I think it probably could have a big impact.

The idea isn't that you can accumulate more knowledge than the doctor or the lawyer has in their field. However I do think that devoting a large amount of time and effort to one narrow, focused problem area can you more context than the expert who has dozens of other cases to worry about. Their background might enable them to get up to speed faster, but unless you go to a specialist who's also dedicating a decent chunk of time to researching a specific problem I think that enough research could give anyone a slight edge in terms of knowledge.

To be clear here, I think it's important to have good practices when researching; not to dissimilar from what your middle school librarian might have taught you in english class. It's hardly research if you're just reading someone else's thoughts on the topic, especially if they're not an expert themselves. The benefit of operating in STEM is that the hard sciences demand cold hard evidence to be proven. Traditional avenues like textbooks and publications are far more important than wikipedia or chatGPT, especially if the final goal involves contradicting what an actual expert is saying.

I think there's a slippery slope that can happen here. You can't go around and always think that you can just apply your massive cranium to find better solutions than everybody else because you're smarter than everybody else. Lean too far in that direction, forget to mix in the right dose of intellectual humility, and you may end up like Steve Jobs who went declined to treat his very treatable cancer for almost a year. Still though, it can be intoxicating to feel like you've found a unique solution to a unique problem, and doubly so if it feels like you only did so thanks to your hard work and curiosity.

I guess I hope that I'll never be in a position where I have to put this to the test. Hopefully I'll always have access to experts who are effective in solving whatever problems I have. Still, I started this by talking about just how much fun it is to research a topic, really get into it, and feel like you've finally grasped an answer. Maybe I'll find myself doing so someday just for the fun of it.