Auto-didacticism: Pros and Cons

Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson

I loved talking to Venture capitalist and Torah scholar Michael Eisenberg about the theology and technology of place, mysticism vs. rationalism, optimism, storytelling, social change, and the search for wisdom in a secular age. Listen to our conversation here. Michael is the author of a unique Torah commentary that combines business insight and economic analysis with classical literary analysis.

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If you know how and where to look, there is an abundance of amazing content on the internet. I’m increasingly coming to the view that knowing how to search for new sources of inspiration is perhaps as important as recalling, organizing, or consuming them. In college, I spent hours rummaging through “the stacks.” I miss those days, but now I get to do some version of it simply by sampling the curated content of people I follow. Agnes Callard (a recent guest on my podcast) has been one of my favorite finds. So I was happy to come across this meta-conversation she had with Robin Hanson where the two discuss auto-didacticism vs. hetero-didacticism (learning on one’s own vs. learning from others).

Agnes says she learns best by seeking others out. Robin says he learns best from solitude. I resonate with both approaches. In college, I spent hours in my professors’ office hours, much like Agnes. In grad school, most of my learning took place in the library, where I spent 6+ hours a day for 4 years with a haul of books. Of course, my learning was supplemented by occasional tutorial meetings with a supervisor and by nightly dinners with smart and thoughtful friends, but I think I can say I’ve done both the heterodidactic thing and the autodidactic thing and have found merits and demerits in both.

My arguments for hetero-didacticism include:

1. The inherent value of alterity and viewpoint diversity—being forced to hit against other minds and to articulate why something matters to you and someone else—surfaces more than the self-contained loop of a monologue on repeat.

2. The feeling of being inspired and motivated by others gives energy to learning where you lag on your own. Just think of running groups or meditation circles or prayer communities and you understand the positive value of sociality.

3. Talent comes in clusters. Learning on your own not only feels lonely, but is inefficient—who can you share your knowledge with other than “the dead” (Chesterton) or the “coming ones” (Heidegger).

4. The power of humility—forcing yourself to make teachers of others even when you think you are superior is good for your character. Given that life is social it is good to practice squeezing out the best from social life rather than treating other people as a chore to get through.

My arguments for auto-didacticism include:

1. No mentorship is better than bad mentorship. You need to be learning from people that can see your strengths and also supplement your interests; someone who has your best interests at heart and honors your independence—but a bad mentor can be destructive.

2. No friends are better than bad friends. Nobody wants to be in a group where they are the subject of jealousy, suspicion, or misapprehension. And while it can be meaningful to be a “giver,” and there’s no better way to learn than to teach, if you are always the smartest person in the room it can be exhausting—where’s the growth?

3. If you feel like an outsider it’s better to own that than try to force yourself to conform. A lot of great discoveries have come from people who were dismissed as crazy (or were crazy). Had they tried to please their teachers or peers they’d have become “midwits.”

4. Reading in silence and solitude doesn’t connect you to others directly, but it’s a more efficient way of processing knowledge than talking to people with “low insights per minute.” Reading, you can control the pace of the conversation. You can pause when you want, re-read when you want, or skim when you want. There’s no pause button or fast forward button in the seminar room or the lecture hall.

I think the debate between learning styles is firstly one of temperament and secondarily one of environment. I reject the idea that one-size-fits-all, so any system that is solely pro-group or pro-solitude is going to leave some people out. The solution is choice. Schools and institutions should have an auto-didactic option and a hetero-didactic option. We should encourage people to try to experiment with different learning styles and discover what works for them. Self-awareness about where one falls on the auto vs hetero-didact spectrum is useful in fashioning one’s learning journey—not just in high school and college, but through all periods of one’s adult life.

I think I’m with Agnes that, for me, heterodidacticism is the ideal and autodidacticism the consolation. That is one of the reasons I have found podcasting—learning through conversation—to be a deeply meaningful endeavor.