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Autodidact = One who teaches themselves and thus learns from themselves on their own. Fundamentally it means self-motivated, self-directed learning and self-organized learning.Now what I intend to do here is connect Self-Teaching and Self-Learning with Self-organization and especially as related to what I call Special Systems Theory. In effect I have a broader theory that I intend to bring to bear on this subject, and in that why hopefully shed more light on it than might normally be possible if we consider it a topic on its own.Basically we are going to consider autodidacticism in the light of Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Ordering Special Systems theory.We can do this because Self-Learning and Self-Teaching, i.e. when a person acts as their own teacher and the learner pursuing knowledge under their own steam, has direct links to self-organization and autopoiesis which means self-production. And it is also clearly a reflexive practice where one person is both teacher and learner at the same time or serially.I have an interest in this because I am mostly self-taught. And the reason one has to be self-taught is that it is easy to get out beyond where anyone else is that might be your teacher, in other words if you are exploring new ground within the tradition then you will end up an autodidact sooner or later.This does not mean I eschew education, and in fact I have two Ph.Ds to show that I think studying in educational institutions is worth while. But they have severe limitations and basically if you want to learn anything deeply you have to do it yourself.I have already written answers that talk about Bateson’s meta-levels of learning, and even extended that to the meta-levels of teaching. So we won’t go into that again here but that is an important part of the discussion.Rather we will apply Special Systems Theory to understand the nature of the autodidacticism and the reflexive relation between self-teaching and self-learning within the context of the broader theory.If you want to know more about the theory itself see Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer.So let us begin as we must looking at the various levels of mirrors that appear in the Hyper Complex Algebras. There is a single mirror, and then two mirrors facing each other, then three mirrors facing each other in a triangular form, and then four mirrors facing each other in a tetrahedral form, these are related to the Real, Complex, Quaternion, and Octonion Hypercomplex algebras. And beyond that there is no more regular combination of mirrors we either have warped mirrors that are joined or we have separated mirrors at various angles in space, but there is no pentahedral mirroring structure that is regular which is in fact quite surprising, but in terms of the Hypercomplex algebras there is the Sedenion and an infinite series expanding like Pascal’s triangle of weak algebras which have lost most of the strong properties we associate with the Hyper complex algebras or the real and complex algebras whose properties are almost the same.We establish this theoretical system from algebra so that we an climb into it and see what its implications are for autodidacticism. However we must keep in mind at the same time that what is sought in autodidacticism is knowledge, and knowledge is sought because in experience it is like gold, which does not rust but remains pure, in as much as knowledge has perdurance, i.e. it stays with us longer than anything else in our experience. And we must be aware as stated in other recent answers that Aristotle’s kinds of knowledge are nous, sophos, epsteme, techne, phronesis, metis which are equal to the various sections of Plato’s Divided Line which breaks Ration and Doxa each into two parts, and provides us with the limits of the Supra-rational and the Para-doxical. The divided line is the fundamental structure of the Western worldview which we have all inherited and embody in our experience of our world everyday. So the types of knowledge are many, and they span the spectrum of our experience. But knowledge itself is persistent, more persistent than anything else in our everchanging experience of our world.So first we should talk about Adrian Bijan’s [http://www.mems.duke.edu/fds/pratt/MEMS/faculty/abejan] Constructal Law http://www.constructal.org/ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory].The constructal law was stated by Bejan in 1996 as follows: "For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it."For a more detailed account see also http://www.constructal.org/en/art/The%20constructal%20law%20and%20the%20thermodynamics%20of%20flow%20systems%20with%20configuration.pdfBasically what Bejan is saying is that we can rethink thermodynamics and see it in terms of the design configurations produced by flows, and see that flows that remain viable over time produce either greater areas, greater volume, or they increase their performance in some way. The basic message is that viability in flow produces design in materials that maximize efficiency or effectiveness or coverage in terms of surface area or mass of the flow. This usually results in trees and the example that he gives all the time are the bronchia and their effectiveness optimization of area of the lung surface verses blood and air flows verses performance of absorption of oxygen into the blood stream. The Bronchia is an optimized architecture that is the results of flows that just naturally falls out as an optimal design based on the continuing viability of the organism and the optimization of these flows over the organisms development.So if we take this basic constructal principle and apply it to knowledge acquisition then we can recognize that for a learner to be effective at learning they must also be efficient, which is to say both at the same time, which is called Efficacious. The flow we are dealing with is the processing of suchness, facts, theories, paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, existences and absolutes. In other words there are not just different kinds of knowledge traditionally recognized within our worldview but also different emergent levels of processing of configurations of eventities associated with knowledge at various scopes that are necessary for the flow of knowledge acquisition to remain viable. Thus if we want the flow of knowledge acquisition to remain viable there must be optimization of area, volume, or performance (efficaciousness). When we realize this, then we see that Academia is designed specifically to limit this construcal flow of knowledge in specific ways in the guise of increasing it. For instance specialization cuts up knowledge in to patches and demands depth in the specialty instead of breadth. So Academia limits surface area covered by a given scholar. Academia sets up blocks to the productivity of scholars, by giving them service, administration, grading, office hours, and other non-scholarly tasks and thus limits volume that they can produce. Academia has a model that the lowest common denominator rules and thus has peer reviewed journals publication in which is essential for promotion, but by this means they make scholars rewrite papers over and over until they are acceptable to anonymous reviewers, and thus cuts down on performance of researchers. Or another ruse is to hamstring scholars in departmental politics, which if they do not play properly has extremely adverse consequences, and thus deflects a lot of energy into the political realm from scholarship. All these and more are the ways that Academia is set up to hinder the spread, or volume, or performance of scholars. Part of that inefficiency is that scholars are thought primarily of as teachers and must spend a lot of their time teaching others, which is good for both the teacher and student but does not contribute much to scholarly output. However, if some in academia did not take teaching seriously there would be no future scholars, and so this particular drag on productivity is actually a boon in other ways. Another Boon is in teaching you learn things you did not know you knew, or you get new insights explaining things to others that you would not have had on your own. So there are many positive side effects to teaching, but I am not sure that it compensates for the time spent reading and grading student papers. Academia acts as a vast filtering system for society, and establishes educational rank that may have ramifications in the careers of students who do or do not pass their courses and get degrees. We are all aware of the limitations and the benefits of educational institutions so it is not worthwhile to dwell on that here beyond what we have mentioned.But if we were to follow Bijan’s constructal law to its utmost we would instead of putting roadblocks in the way of scholars instead we would attempt to increase volume, area, or performance of the scholar’s work of transforming raw materials produced by the tradition such as those already mentioned by thinking of them as being transformed along the spectrum from givens, data, information, knowledge, wisdom, insight, to realization and beyond. The first set of emergent levels are those associated with society, and this second set of transforms are those associated with the comprehension of the individual. The individual must take what is available in the tradition and transform it into something that makes sense to them and hopefully in the process create new knowledge. The individual sets up this flow by identifying a problematic, and then pursuing the exploration of that problematic as an intellectual adventure via their own dialectical engagement with the materials offered by the tradition. In that process the scholar is remaking the tradition and himself at the same time.Now it just so happened that I by accident in my career as a postgraduate had the opportunity to experience the full articulation of the constructal flow in scholarship, which I think is actually fairly rare. I went to England and did a Ph.D. there is sociology. Not thinking I had a chance of finishing the degree I decided to make the absolute most of the opportunity I had to study in Senate House and the British Museum any book or subject that caught my fancy. And so I applied a simple rule, after establishing a wide topic that could be interpreted broadly to cover where ever I ended up but which at the same time gave me a very good problematic. My problematic was the nature of Emergence in the Western Scientific tradition. My Ph.D. title was The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence. Once this basic direction was set I applied my rule which was read the most fascinating book I could find on the most interesting subject to me at the moment, and then use what I learned from that to find the next most fascinating book regardless of its subject area. So I set about reading everything I could within the tradition that impinged on my subject, and that basically took me to almost every relevant subject at one time or another. And this resulted in an almost pure application of the Bijan constructal theory. First of all in terms of area I covered many many different subjects delving into each as deeply as need be for the necessary understanding and over time returning to the same subjects over and over again deepening my understanding continually of various subjects. In terms of Flow that was measured by the number of books and articles read, the number of diagrams, notes and working papers done. However, in those nine years most of it was spent reading, and only at the end did I immerse myself in writing. So volume was measured first by the amount of books digested and then later the number of working papers produced. Performance in terms of efficiency or effectiveness was low in the sense that since I did not think it was possible for me to pass the course, I took my time and did a lot of thinking, discussing with colleagues, and pursuing the academic life of the student to the fullest extent, which in the middle of London included participation in as many cultural and aesthetic events as possible. So I went to museums over and over, for instance walking though the British museum by a different path almost every day. Long walks on the Hampstead Heath in parks all throughout London. You can walk from Highgate all the way to Kew Gardens almost completely though parks, and I would do that regularly. I sat in on classes and lectures at the various colleges in London. I went to Cambridge and Oxford to explore on a regular basis. And generally I took my intellectual and cultural life afforded by living in London and going to University of London very seriously. I would say that I was not particularly trying to be effective or efficient but considered this a time of playfulness in the intellectual and cultural arena. For instance, I watched hundreds of movies from all over the world. With the National Film theater across the bridge from LSE this was fairly easy.In the end I was encouraged to bring my studies to an end and so I stopped reading and started writing and in that time I produced more than 1000 pages of working papers, and finally a four hundred or so 488 page Dissertation including bibliography that had about 800 relevant books in it. Eventually I passed my orals with this dissertation and was awarded the degree. When I finished my advisor said “Now you have a general education, and you can go on to your real academic work.” If seven or so years reading in the British museum is a general education, then I wonder what kind of education others are getting. But regardless I found that there was no call for sociologists of any kind on my return home because the discipline had collapsed while I was away, and so I became a software and systems engineer in industry instead of an academic. But I continued my research vigorously and eventually did another Ph.D. in Systems Engineering this time at an Australian school, which I also enjoyed greatly. And because their system is similar to that of England I basically did the same thing again, only this time I started writing from the beginning, and wrote working papers throughout my studies so as to capture my ideas and their development better along the way. The second time around I was more interested in production of working papers and read to support my writing rather than the other way around. I also was more efficient and effective because I had been through it before, and also I could afford to buy the books that were important for my studies now, and also I was more focused on the goal of finishing, rather than taking it as an endless summer as I had previously.Overtime I extended my bibliography many times what it was after the LSE experience, and I also wrote many books long and short as well as many working papers as I did my research, and much of this is available on my various websites.But in this whole process I think I learned a lot about the Constructal nature of being an autodidact. I think of my life as an intellectual adventure, which has been very fruitful in the depth of the speculative theories I have ended up producing. The intellectual adventure is the flow. I am a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary researcher and thus the area of my studies being extremely wide expresses the optimization of the flow across the intellectual and cultural landscape. In terms of volume the number of books I have read and the papers I have written is quite large, and so volume is very great over thirty years or so. But we are here actually to talk about autodidactic performance. What is it that enhances autodidactic performance? Because by my own standards my performance is quite good, even though others are sometimes critical. I view performance by only one measure which is the number of ideas produced or processed and comprehended. And by that measure my notebooks over the years show this performance as well as my papers, and for that matter my answers to diverse questions on Quora that are advertisements for my other quasi-academic works but also contributes to my further intellectual growth by confronting topics that I would not normally write about in academic or working papers because I consider my expertise as limited in some of these areas. I tend to write my actual papers in subjects where my research has been such that I consider that I have mastered the literature and have something to contribute that is not seen in the literature as yet. But here I pontificate on all sorts of things I would never presume to write articles about.Be that as it may lets get back to the main subject with which we started this particular excursion. And that is the application of Special Systems Theory to the teacher/taught self-learning self-organizing relations that I have learned in my quest for understanding the depths of my problematic.When the student learns or the teacher teaches and they look out on the face of the other they are looking into a mirror, because teachers were once students, and students in the future most likely to some degree will be teachers. And so there is the Lacanian mirror stage in which the infant sees and recognizes themselves in a mirror and that leads to the explicit understanding of the self, which until them was as Demasio says implicit in every experience. But there is a higher order mirror stage in which the teacher looks out at his class and sees himself as a student long ago, or conversely when a student looks at the teacher and sees themselves as a future teacher. But it is time that separates these roles and a great deal of learning and experience in the interim.But no matter how good your teachers are, the best thing they can do is lead you to the cutting edge of your discipline and then bade you good voyaging. But they can give you tools to help you along your way, and basically that is what good education is about, providing good tools to support scholarship. Now the tools that I learned that I think were out of the ordinary were basically two. From C.K. Warriner I learned to write working papers, and from Alfonso Verdu I learned to express complex sets of ideas of a thinker in diagrams. So with these lessons learned as an undergraduate I went off the tackle learning the Western Scientific and Philosophical Tradition as best I could, which by the way is an endless task and which I am still struggling with.Working papers allow you to express what you know and do not know, you write them and put them away, and then when you know more you get them back out and rewrite them, and they allow you to work out the meaning of your diagrams, and extend them into learning things from writing you would not have known otherwise.Diagrams allow you to synthesize systems of thought so that they can be taken in at a glance, analyzed, transformed, transfigured, and remembered, and communicated.These two techniques together with a lot of hard work trying to understand difficult books that are the canon of our tradition yields the first glimmers of understanding.Another principle I would like to state is that when one is studying a thinker one must put away ones own thought and that of other thinkers and attempt to understand the given focus of ones study in their own terms attempting to understand what they have written as they meant it to be understood. In other words we want to learn to think like the thinker we are studying as much as possible while studying them, comparison with others or critique from ones own point of view comes later. And the measure of understanding is to be able to go beyond the information, or knowledge, or wisdom, or insights or realizations given by the thinker himself.Another principle is to read the thinker themselves first before reading the commentaries. But for primary thinkers one should read as much of the commentarial literature as possible, or as feasible given what one is trying to achieve in ones study of that thinker. For the fundamental thinkers one should read the entire commentarial literature if possible. For instance a few years ago I did that for Blake so I could understand his Four Zoas. So when I say something about Blake I do so in the context of having read almost every major commentator on his work. If thinker is key to ones thought one must pay them and the tradition that respect.So my key teachers Warriner and Verdu gave me some very specific tools of my trade, and I took those tools and applied them to the agreed upon cannon of the Continental Philosophical Tradition with minor forays into the Analytic tradition. So basically I spent my time reading difficult and long books, diagramming them and writing working papers about their interrelations with each other that I learned as I went along. And this was very effective over time in allowing me to come to terms with the Western tradition generally. Basically I wanted to know why the phenomena of Emergence existed in the Western tradition and what it meant within that context.So I went from a student who learned some unique techniques of scholarship from my teachers, to someone who knew the tradition based on the use of those techniques, and thus could teach others, as I am attempting to do in my written works, and in these answers on Quroa. My teaching is based on my own synthesis and synopsis of the tradition forged over many years of struggle with it. My teaching is about how to go deeply within the Western tradition to understand what is at its structural core which surprisingly is nonduality. Thus the one tradition that has pursued duality to the utmost and killed off or fought to a standoff anyone who tried to introduce the nondual for consideration turns out to have an inner kernel which is nondual that most people in the tradition do not realize is there and that is because it this kernel is covered by a radical nihilism as has been said by Nietzsche and Heidegger.But this is only considering the mirror that the teacher is for the student and the student is for the teacher. But there are other levels that we will enumerate as follows:Learning to Learn to Learn to Learn to Learn – Ultra Knowledge· Meta-systemLearning to Learn to Learn to Learn – Wild Knowledge· Reflexive Social Special System – four mirrorsLearning to Learn to Learn – Hyper KnowledgeAutopoietic Symbiotic Special System - three mirrors· Learning to Learn – Process KnowledgeDissipative Ordering Special System – two mirrors· Learning – Pure KnowledgeSystem – one mirror seen by student or teacher but not both at the same time.· Experience in the lifeworld with what one knows at a given time.Here we consider the learning to be striated and the teaching to be unstriated. So teaching is unified while learning is discontinuously emergent.So lets start walking up this ladder to nowhere, i.e. to existence as empty or void.The Academic System gives the teacher a mirror in his students and the students a mirror in their teacher, but not at the same time. Each looking into their separate mirrors, in the other, allows learning to take place and gives us pure knowledge. That is to say the students think that the knowledge derived from what is taught was some how written in stone merely to be memorized by earlier generations of scholars via an objective method that yielded perfect knowledge such as you find synthesized in any text book. The teacher teaches from the text book containing the knowledge pre-digested, and the students memorize what is in the textbook augmented by the lectures, and then the teacher tests the student, because the knowledge thus attained is an objective measure of the student’s performance and intrinsic worth. Good students do not question what is being taught, and good teachers teach by the book and do not deviate from the established curriculum. And so it goes on each generation testing the next generation and acting as a living filter for excellence in the students for learning matched by the excellence in teaching by the teacher. OK, all this is a fantasy, but it is based on this fantasy that each generation is tested and filtered by the previous generation as if any of that actually mattered. Learning by rote, teaching by the book – these do not really yield knowledge except of the most superficial type.Next we enter the Dissipative Ordering Special System described by Prigogine. In this situation we have Progress, apparent or real where Knowledge is advanced. A dissipative structure re-orders its environment with an expanding wave of negative entropy. Here we get schools of thought articulated and vying with each other for dominance. But from the point of view of the student it is as if they were caught between two mirrors and the knowledge were seen as the infinitely ramifying series of representations that appear in the mirrors. Here suddenly teacher and taught become unified, and the roots of auto-didacticism begins. Here we find learning to learn to be the rule, i.e. we continually are learning new ways of learning as Bateson says. Sitting in ones Barber chair one sees an infinitely ramifying set of images unfold in a virtual space within the mirroring in which representations give rise to other representations endlessly. Each generation of scholars writes books that are read and these lead to new books being written. Earlier scholars have ideas that are picked up transformed into new ideas, and among these are “memes” that are the equivalent of mini-ideologies that serve as the basis of schools of thought all with their adherents. What ideologies you pick up is based on the prejudices and insights of ones teachers, and ones own proclivities. Knowledge itself is ever expanding as scholars look in greater detail at ever so small subject matters, and experimental evidence piles up, is interpreted, and conclusions are drawn. New facts emerge, and new theories are proposed, new paradigms are embraced with their inherent assumptions that make some things more clear and other things more obscure. Epistemes are established that are fundamental sources of categorization, and occasionally we get a new interpretation of the absurdity of Being, or new glimpses at the underlying substrata of existence beyond our illusions, or hints of other absolutes to be pursued.Man as the one who teaches himself and is taught by himself stands between the mirror of the future and the mirror of the past, and all the representations that ramify between future and past as progress occurs are images of man himself who inhabits the interstice which is the current period within the evolution of the scientific community. The scholar realizes that knowledge evolves and is somewhat fragile, and takes on some of the characteristics of a witch hunt, i.e. of self-fulfilling prophecies which drive the evolution of thought. Suddenly there is old knowledge and new knowledge and god help anyone who embraces new knowledge too soon, or creates it, or who hangs on to old knowledge too late. Here the negative image of the auto-didact is realized where everything is the image of oneself, and one merely feeds the expansion of that image of Man himself who is the teacher of himself and the one who learns from himself, and everything is a closed circulation of the same information merely reprocessed over and over again. The illusion of progress is very strong, but the reality of progress is even stronger. The winners write the history. Those who pass the test, in turn make up the next set of tests. Everywhere we look all we see is ourselves in various guises.The image of this level from Plato is the Republic, i.e. hell on earth. Socrates has gone down to Piraeus to see the advent of a new goddess entering the city. Emergent events are self generated and then we see them as coming from the outside and as something new replacing the old Gods as objects of veneration.At the next level is where the true auto-didact appears along the analogy of the autopoietic system, i.e. the system that is self-producing and thus self-organizing. The image of self-organization is knots that are organized against themselves, provide resistance to themselves by their self-interference. All the various ideas that are generated in the tradition interlock at a structural level once you see that they are all recapitulations of the same underlying pattern that creates a network of influences and counter influences. The Auto-didact is the one who teaches themselves the underlying patterns that are ramified throughout the various disciplines but is actually variations on the same themes. Once one realizes that the same basic ideas form the groundwork of all disciplines then stability is reached and structural models appear that allow the translation between all the disciplines, and the tradition becomes a single web, whose weaver is not the individual self-made scholar, but rather the community of scholars who make each other by their mutual recognition. Disciplines merely borrow from each other and build up the same pictures with the content of their various subject areas informed by similar ways of thinking such that all knowledge interlocks and becomes a single fabric, the motifs of which repeat endlessly.And here the focus is on not just new techniques of learning that the student can employ, such as working papers or diagramming, but rather on the creation of those new techniques oneself. This is the level where the tools of the trade transform in our hands and new tools emerge and this forging of new tools out of old tools based on their application to the materials of our study yield genuinely new results.In Plato this is the City of the Laws. It is inland away from the coast of foreign influences. Here the city of the tradition stabilizes, because there are only so many permutations of basic structural patterns of thought that underlie the web of the tradition. Suddenly instead of everything ramifying out of control the tradition becomes one set of repeated underlying patterns, and if you teach yourself those patterns then you have the keys by which all the doors of the labyrinth of the tradition can be unlocked. The true auto-didact is the one who can teach himself and learn these underlying patterns of thought by which the tradition itself is woven becoming at the same time the master of that tradition, and its weaver. But this is done by continually learning new techniques of learning what one has learned. The tradition is one web or network of fundamental ideas and approaches seems everywhere, but that is based on ones own continuing to sharpen ones tools of scholarship and the creation of new ones that delve deeper into the underpinnings of the tradition itself. That tradition is wracked by emergent events of various scales and scopes, but even these emergent events are merely the same thing occurring again and again, which is what is happening here, that is the combination of the kinds of Being in a new face of the world. The teacher who teaches themselves new tricks in order to keep up with the emergence within the worldview of new theories, paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, existences, and absolutes, and who sees the same process occurring everywhere, i.e. emergence appearing as too light on the too dark of nihilism within the tradition, has obtained the keys to the kingdom so to speak, and those keys and their locks are constantly changing, but in that change there is an abiding and perdurance that is unexpected given the drastic differences produced by emergence, and the unbearable sameness produced by nihilism. At this level the number of real differences that make a difference are few and extremely few, but they are genuine differences that give the tradition new life from within itself. To step into that tradition completely is to know its cutting edge, to go beyond that edge and to bring back what is genuinely new contributing to the genuine advance of the tradition, rather than the apparent advances that merely turn out to be new versions of the same thing, that only appear different.Hyper-knowledge is of course what Heidegger calls de-construction which was taken up by Derrida. It is knowledge of the changes to knowledge that in the very act of knowing changes knowledge, because change changes change within the tradition. From the time of Plato this was called the third kind of knowledge which is the type of knowledge that the Demiurge knew that allowed him to give rise to the world. And it is that kind of knowledge that Plato calls the Worldsoul which is a moving image of eternity within the tradition itself, which remains the same despite continuous radical emergent change within the tradition. The deconstruction of the tradition of itself by itself is real. In that reconstruction the Phoenix arises from its own ashes. In the city of the Laws (NOMOS) the seemingly random emergences of new gods and foreign influences turns out to be in fact a meta-stability, and the city prospers because it has self-imposed laws, that are right, and maintain the good, and establish that the city has a shared fate. This is a vision of the city of knowledge similar to that created by Herman Hesse in his Glass Bead Game, in which understanding the tradition of the history of culture and ideas was a great game in which there were only so many moves available because actually the genuine emergences were few, and the structural underpinnings of the whole tradition were understood so that one might play a sort of intellectual chess by manipulating the structural permutations of the ideas within that history. This is the view that the intellectual tradition of the West is much like the Catholic church in which a few structural permutations play out in the dialectic between heresy and dogma. Even though there is a teleonomy (Monod) to the development of dogma in the face of heresy there is still only one universal church who is the body of Christ and that holds within it the holy spirit embodied on earth doing the will of God the Father. What the Catholic Church and its protestant images are to ungrounded belief, science is to representations and empirically grounded opinion, i.e. the central parts of the Divided line. What they both share is the impossibility of reaching the non-representable intelligibles that they share and what makes them two faces of the same tradition. Hesse’s academic monks studying the history of the western tradition and playing their game was giving a picture of the absolute reason working itself out in the tradition. Given Aristotle’s metaphysics that affirms non-contradiction and the excluded middle, there are only so many permutations of the basic structural concepts underlying the tradition, and when those are exhausted in their combinatorics then only genuine emergence can reset nihilism and start the cycle over again by contributing something genuinely new, which is really merely as Dreyfus says taking something marginal and making it central and taking what is central and making it marginal. Once the game has played out we merely change the rules, and as Anthony Wilden says The Rules are no Game.Auto-didacticism in this context is merely understanding the basic game being played within the tradition and the mechanism by which the rules change. This is not a rote understanding but a realization of how to create new tools for learning and new techniques for comprehending the tradition so that one may stay in tune with the self-transformations of the tradition itself, out of its own structural underpinnings. At this point one realizes that there are only a few books in the whole tradition that matter and they are the canonized books because in their time they were the fundamental game changers. The ideas they brought merely spread though the tradition establishing the new norm before the next fundamental change occurs that takes the tradition by storm, but in this transformation the fundamental structures of the tradition do not change because it is those structures like the dialectic of emergence and nihilism itself that make those radical changes possible.The triangular configuration of mirrors produces in the virtual realm a series of hexagonal cells, like the cells of a beehive. That is a stable standing wave pattern within which all the changes within those virtual realms occur.The true auto-didact is learning what the tradition itself has to teach. The Tradition is self-organizing and re-organizing itself based on basic principles, it is establishing for itself principles and then breaking those principles to establish new ones on a continuing basis. The Tradition is teaching itself by learning about itself at deeper and deeper levels of comprehension and profundity, and the true auto-didact is merely learning from that fundamental transformative movement at the structural level within the tradition. The tradition learns from the auto-didact as new techniques for learning are created. The auto-didact learns from the tradition as it structurally transforms itself though emergent events on the background of nihilism it produces thus producing radically new contexts for learning while at the same time remaining fundamentally the same.At the next level one is moving into the reflexive level where the auto-didact must recognize the Other in order to be self-conscious and know himself. At each meta-level of learning we approach more closely to absolute emergence. Here we reach the place where the auto-didact cannot go any further without recognizing the other as Other, in order to know himself. We suddenly leave the realm of Kant and enter the realm of Hegel which is a fundamental transformation within the tradition. Here the auto-didact becomes reflexively aware of himself, as one of the Names that the tradition revolves around. There is a community of the canonical names within the tradition, and there is a conversation over time between these names of the fathers (and mothers) of the Tradition. And at the reflexive level one becomes oneself one of those Names that father the tradition. Of course, there is a lot of Lacanian Ink to be spilled over this in true Zizekian style as we reduce Lacan and all the other Continental Philosophers of recent vintage to Hegel and ultimately to the Kant of the third critique, at least as far as Bernstein is concerned. Note the “Names” in the last sentence. We are assuming one has read and knows what these figures have said and we are allowing them speculatively in our mind to converse with each other and we are taking up that conversation ourselves and playing key role of bringing the conversants across time together to discuss in our dialectical investigation the nature of the worldview itself. We are not merely mimicking their positions, or twisting them to our own ends but hearing their own voices within the ultimate conversation that is taking place in the tradition and we are participating in that conversation ourselves.The image of this emergent level of the tradition knowing itself is that of Atlantis, the great sea power that fought ancient Athens (which looks very much like the Republic). At this level we are part of a tradition that is a dominant world power and whose language everyone wants to know in order to be heard themselves. But this is also the level at which language is no longer a barrier because they are all Indo-European languages in which the tradition was forged. At the reflexive level we are having a genuine conversation across time and space and language barriers with other thinkers from the past and perhaps from the future. This is because in Old English there are only two tenses Complete (Peterite) and Incomplete, and past and future are both images of the Peterite these one projected backward and the other projected forward, but representing in both cases the OrLog, the sedimentation of the tradition which is based on its fatedness. At this level the Auto-Didact takes up the conversation between the Canonical names of the Fathers himself and participates in it actively. And so there is a sense in which they animate him, and another sense in which they are animated by him. And this conversation informs the conversation with the contemporaries, while the conversation with the contemporaries informs the conversation among the Canonical Figures which stand in as the Names of the Father. In a sense we are that self-conscious conversation of spirit across history and nothing else. But if we do not know what the others would say based on their canonical writings then we cannot participate in that conversation, nor can we contribute ourselves. So we have to know the tradition in order to truly be a part of it. And how many of us have gotten into that situation. Very few. Mostly those who have gotten into that position are those who have completely in their own way internalized the conversation of the tradition, and attempted to advance the agenda of that dialogue by bringing back from the cutting edge what is genuinely emergent for our tradition. Atlantis is the fantasy empire in the midst of the sea, at war with the Republic (ancient Athens). Today we belong to this fantasy empire set in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the pillars of Hercules called America whose empire supports the neo-colonial policies of corporatist globalization. But because of this sustained Imperialism of the European powers and the shift of economic if not cultural power to America the internal conversation among the canonical names within the tradition becomes a global conversation of interest to everyone as Absolute Reason plays itself out globally and Absolute Spirit encompasses all the people of the earth as our Manifest Destiny to bring Corporatism to the whole earth and its inhabitants (now shareholders, customers, and employees) and its resources to be exploited.As Zizek explains parodying Lacan and at the same time making him comprehensible perhaps for the first time as the anti-Derrida, the names of the Father are signifers of empty placeholders within the series of signifiers. So when we refer to the name we are referring to the displaced (differing and deferring) signification of the works of those thinkers within the tradition, and what has become infinite are the interpretations of the terms used by those canonical figures. But all the interpretations taken together as the set of existing commentaries merely work out the structural possibilities for interpreting each name within the successive contexts of the history of the tradition. So the works plus the commentaries, plus the biography and the history of the times of the canonical figure together constitute the voice of that figure, but still it remains an empty floating signifier, a name of the father, by which we communicate by bringing these figures into dialog with each other virtually via our own internal conversation in our thoughts. At the reflexive level which is social this group of canonical figures form their own community which is the tip of the iceberg of the work of myriad scholars over the centuries that has served to focus the problematic to be addressed in this dialectical discourse. We stage the Platonic discourses in our own thought-stream and the discussion across time and into the future is lively and engaging, and at this level the auto-didact has found his true peers. He appears with them in their symposium. He gets his own name as the facilitator of their continuing conversation. And thus we find our home within our tradition and our own voice among the canonical voices.Wild knowledge is not to think outside of the box but to think where there were no boxes in the first place prior to the imposition of all our conceptual boxes.But there is a final layer, which is the meta-system within which the Western Tradition as dominant operates. That is the environment of world intellectual history. It turns out that the most sophisticated thoughts were had elsewhere already and that we are still striving to attain what others in other traditions have already attained previously. When we put the Western tradition into the context of India and China and their traditions and we understand our tradition in relation to those then we begin the true dialogue with the Other, not just as another voice within our own tradition, but in a higher order conversation between intellectual traditions. This does not really occur as long as we are embroiled in Orientalism, i.e. as long as we are projecting our ideas on the other cultures and civilizations and their intellectual traditions. At this highest-level conversation is where we find the themes of nonduality verses duality and we recognize that different civilizations have encountered and responded to the nondual in various different ways. How we handle dualism in relation to nonduality within our tradition is the future of this conversation among civilizations. If we can overcome the clash of cavitation’s then we have a lot to learn from other civilizations that were more sophisticated than ours in the past. We are barbarians and newcomers to dominance, and many have held that position before only to lose it. Our fate as a civilization and the fate of the earth and all the species on the earth hinge on our self-understanding and we cannot understand ourselves without an other, and our other must be other unrelated global civilizations. The conversation among civilizations over ultimates holds the fate of our species and all other species in the balance. And the auto-didact at this point has entered the sea itself from which Atlantis claims power prior to the cataclysm. The sea of the ebb and flow of civilization and intellectual traditions across the globe is vast. Our dominance has lasted for such a short time. Yet if Earth ends up like Venus then there may not be any other civilization after the first global empire. So it behooves us to listen carefully what those other civilizations have to teach us. The auto-didact at this level is taught by the conversation among thinkers from diverse civilizations some way more sophisticated than our own. This auto-didact speaks these voices of the other and indicates the Homeward path. It is the path by which the most virulent of destructive civilization in the slumber of dualism and nihilism can wake up and make non-nihilistic distinctions necessary to avoid global destruction and save itself and all others from its own environmental suicidal terrorism. It is the path by which the most ardent and vehement of the dualistic civilizations recognizes the necessity of the nondual kernel of its own tradition beyond the generative core that produces the meta-nihilism of the duality of nihilism (too dark) and emergence (too bright). Meta-emergence is the advent of the novum of nonduality out of the kernel of the Western worldview itself. The voices of the other worldviews are their sages that speak with a nondual voice and teach how to make non-nihilistic distinctions. We have put to death those in our tradition that spoke to us with such a voice which is not tied to the permutation of structural opposites underlying the tradition and out of whom the tradition is built in a random walk though the combinatorics. Those speaking from that unexpected direction that has no from or to in our own tradition are few but we will mention Meister Eckhart as a rare exception to the rule of the Inquisition (he died before they could reach him).Ultra Knowledge is the knowledge of the singularity of the arising of nonduality within the Western tradition, which will be the most radical change yet to this tradition, which other traditions have undergone and survived. The problem is that if we do not undergo this meta-emergent event we may not survive as a civilization, let alone as a species, let alone helping other species to survive, let alone letting the earth survive its heat death and its transformation into a sister planet with Venus. Methane stores at the bottom of the Arctic ocean are already starting to vent.

I have mainly worked in banks, but in between I have worked as a recruiting agent. I was not a highly specialised recruiter. I had studied it on my own by reading textbooks on the subject. When I had the job, I realised that the people skills I had learnt in the bank were far more important than the textbook theories. A job interviewer is often more interested in WHO you are, WHAT KIND OF PERSON or colleague you will be for the people you will work with, what your behaviour is under stress, etc. than in WHAT your skills are exactly. That’s why the person who gets the job is often not the most intelligent one, but the one who fits the best in the company.Before I start, I must inform you that competition for business analyst positions is high, so having a degree is a distinct advantage.This could be in a relevant subject (business information systems or business computing systems), but it could also be in other disciplines (history, economics, maths), so long as you can demonstrate excellent analytical skills.Do not apply for the job if you are not 100% motivated, because of the prestige or the expectations of your parents. You must ENJOY the job: evaluating and analysing data, creating solutions, communicating with a variety of people and have a good grasp of information technology.<SKILLSexcellent communication skills, with the ability to talk to and present to a range of audiences, sometimes acting as a translator between parties;the ability to motivate others and lead change;the ability to work under pressure on multiple projects within your project timeframes;a passion for creating solutions with a positive attitude to change;excellent analytical skills and an informed, evidence-based approach;a strong interest in business and business development;a good understanding of information technology.IMPORTANT 1Many candidates make the same mistakes during job interviews.-They have prepared the interview and start by enumerating their skills. If I would have believed them, they were perfect in all the skills one can think of.-They kept talking about their high grades, their theoretical knowledge, their problem solving skills, details about the subjects they knew. For me it was very boring.What they forgot was to describe their people skills, how they saw what working in a team was, to tell me a fluent story about what personalities they had. It was rare that they surprised me or made me laugh.-As a business analyst, you'll work within an organisation. Very often you will think your solution is the best and conclude that the team chose something totally different. How will you react on that? Become angry, show your frustration? That’s what recruiters want to know.IMPORTANT 2Many candidates know nothing about the company and tell the same boring stories-Come PREPARED: do your homework and read all the information you can find about its activities, the vacancy, if possible: talk to someone who works there.-Don’t be nervous, dare to laugh, be yourself, speak in human language (avoid ‘business speak’ or clichés, don’t start every sentence with ‘I’.) If you have read too many business books you will tell your story in that style. You will say hollow things such as ‘I’m very goal-oriented’, ‘the team is more important than the individual’, ‘I care more for the result of the team than for my personal superiority’, ‘It doesn’t matter that a colleague has a better idea than mine, the result counts’.Why is that not a good idea? Because I know you’re lying: of course you want that the team chooses your idea instead of someone else’s. Of course you want to be better than the others. There’s nothing wrong with saying that in an interview. It shows that you’re a man with balls!You need to know what will be expected from you:Usually: helping to manage change and plan for the future in line with company goals. This could be for one specific project, or as a permanent feature of the organisation.-You'll need to understand the current organisational situation, identify future needs and create solutions to help meet those needs, usually (but not always) in relation to information and software systems.-You'll need to demonstrate excellent understanding of the way the organisation works and the sector it operates in, as you will be helping the organisation to develop its functions, services and products to meet goals with internal and external stakeholders and customers.-You will also play a key role in communicating between internal departments and external parties, acting as a 'translator' where necessary to incorporate how information technology can support the organisation's needs.>VERY IMPORTANT:Observe, observe, observe; listen, listen, listen; in theory team members have little hierarchy, but in reality certain members have more influence than others, there are leaders and followers, they have unwritten rules on how to work together. Those are things they will never tell you, you’ll have to find out for yourself. It’s crucial that you know the relations between the other team members, the power of each of them.Be humble in the beginning, ask relevant questions, don’t be cocky. Take notes. Do your own research after hours. Try to find how competing companies have solved similar problems. When you have specific knowledge on a subject, let them know and say what you know in a concise way, in a couple of clear sentences. Don’t bore them by exaggerating or stealing the show.<OTHER TERMS FOR BUSINESS ANALYST:business architect; business systems analyst; enterprise analyst; management consultant; process analyst; product manager; product owner; requirements engineer; systems analyst.RESPONSIBILITIESAs a business analyst, you will need to:-communicate with internal colleagues to understand the needs of departments and the organisation as a whole;-work with external stakeholders to understand and investigate feedback into the service/function/product provided;-use data modelling practices to analyse your findings and create suggestions for strategic and operational improvements and changes;-consider the opportunities and potential risks attached to the suggestions you have made;-identify the processes and information technology required to introduce your recommendations;-gain agreement, usually from senior management, of the best method of introducing your recommendations to the business;-communicate the benefits of your recommendations across departments and help to address any uncertainty and concern;-produce written documentation to support your work (*), report on your findings and to present to stakeholders when necessary;-support the staff and teams in making the recommended changes, including helping to resolve any issues;-ensure plans are made and processes are created to evaluate the impact of the changes made, including taking responsibility for overseeing and reporting on this evaluation.SALARY UK-Starting salaries for business analysts are between £21,000 and £31,000.-The average salary of a business analyst, with approximately five years’ experience, ranges between £32,000 and £38,000.-Experienced business analysts can earn £39,000 to in excess of £50,000.[Business analyst roles exist on a permanent basis within organisations, but you could also work on a freelance/contract basis once you have gained some relevant experience. As an experienced business analyst, you could expect to charge around £350 per day.] Income figures are intended as a guide only.WORKING HOURSYour working hours may vary, depending on whether you are a permanent employee (in which case you could expect to work full time, usually Monday to Fridays with some weekend work), or a contractor (where you may work longer hours during the week and sometimes weekends in order to complete project-based work within a specific timeframe).You will need to have a flexible approach to working extra hours when the need arises.WHAT TO EXPECT-You could make significant change and impact within your role, making a substantial difference to the success of a company and the satisfaction of its employees, both of which can be very rewarding.-You will work to deadlines and juggle multiple projects, which gives lots of variety but can be stressful.The role is largely office-based but will require travel to meet different internal and external stakeholders.You will need to demonstrate a high level of professionalism (bla bla bla) and formal dress is the norm.QUALIFICATIONSRelevant experience of managing projects can provide a pathway into working as a business analyst, although this is more likely for someone with a few years' industry experience, rather than someone looking to begin their career in this field.As well as your degree, employers value experience and transferable skills, such as the ability to work in groups, analyse data, use technology and manage projects, which could be related to your studies or extra-curricular activities.If you are a graduate from a non IT-related subject, you could take a relevant postgraduate qualification. Search for postgraduate courses in computer science and IT.WORK EXPERIENCE-Business analysis exists in almost every sector, from not-for-profit organisations through to retail and the financial services. It is a fast-paced and competitive industry so gaining work experience is essential.-You could apply for voluntary work with small enterprises to help improve a particular function of their organisation; this might even have a charitable focus.-Take advantage of any summer internship and placement opportunities provided on your course, they provide an excellent chance to gain first hand, practical experience and skills.-You can also contact organisations directly to enquire about work shadowing, showing an enthusiasm for this area of work and for their business sector.EMPLOYERSBusiness analysts are needed in the public and private sector, large multi-national companies and smaller independent enterprises. There is scope to work in this field whatever your sector interest may be. Employers may offer permanent employment, or fixed-term contracts to work on a specific project.Many business analysts with industry experience work on a self-employed or consultancy basis.Individual companies advertise their own business analyst positions, so search the websites of any organisations that appeal to you. You could make a speculative approach or use existing networks, such as those run by professional bodies and societies.INCREASE YOUR VALUEIn any role it is important to keep developing your skills and knowledge in line with your own interests and changes in your sector. Many organisations offer professional development through in-house training and on-the-job courses but it is your responsibility to find your own opportunities to progress.As a business analyst, you will find it useful to participate in training linked to:change management;data analytics;improved communication;information systems;project management.CAREER PROSPECTSAs an entry-level business analyst, gaining experience across multiple projects would be helpful for your career development. As your career progresses, you may choose to remain as a general business analyst or specialise in a particular area such as data analytics.Career advancement opportunities might include progression to senior level business analyst. Successful business analysts with considerable experience and a proven track record can progress to working at director and executive level.>Written by Gemma HunterUniversity of Birmingham · August 2016© Copyright AGCAS & Graduate Prospects Ltd · DisclaimerAlternative careers: Management consultant; Application analyst; Data analyst; Compliance officer; Cartographer; Product managerNBWhat’s not between < > is what I’ve written myself.Very important: keep track of what you do by putting everything you do on paper or saving it on another device. When sth is really important, a paper memo catches more attention than an email. Keep doubles of memo’s and messages to protect yourself.The job you asked about is a very demanding one. You’ll need enough finances to get a degree, enough courage to study and pass.If I were in your place, I wouldn’t choose to become a business analyst. It will be very hard to get your first job, it’ll take years to be really good at it, but in most cases you’ll remain a highly qualified employee. That means that until your retirement you will have one or more people above you. That also means that those people can fire you when you’re 40 or 45 and hire a cheaper and younger employee instead of you.If I had to decide, I’d try to be my own man and become an independent worker. I’ll give a simple example: learn a trade such as plumber. Start alone or with one worker. Soon you’ll have enough work to hire another worker. You are the boss and do the marketing, the administration… The advantage is that you earn money on the working hours and on the bathrooms, jaccuzzis, boilers, whatever … you sell your customers. Nobody will ever fire you and if you use the skills you need for being a business analyst for your own business, you can easily enlarge your company and in the end you’ll be a richer man, a freeer man, a man with less stress than most of the business analysts. Think about it.SUCCESSLet me know what you think. I’d appreciate it.

EDIT: I have expanded my initial Quora response to the following, which I have also reproduced on Medium:Is majoring in liberal arts a mistake for students?Critical Thinking and the Scientific Process First — Humanities LaterIf luck favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, we’re in danger of becoming a very unlucky nation. Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.Consider all the science and economics that has been updated, the shifting theories of psychology, the programming languages and political theories that have been developed, and even how many planets our solar system has. Much, like literature and history, should be evaluated against updated, relevant priorities in the 21st century.I feel that liberal arts education in the United States is a minor evolution of 18th century European education. The world needs something more than that. Non-professional undergraduate education needs a new system that teaches students how to learn and judge using the scientific process on issues relating to science, society, and business.Though Jane Austen and Shakespeare might be important, they are far less important than many other things that are more relevant to make an intelligent, continuously learning citizen, and a more adaptable human being in our increasingly more complex, diverse and dynamic world.I would coin a new term, “the liberal sciences,” as this basic education, the test for which would be quite simple: at the end of an undergraduate education, is a student roughly able to understand and discuss the Economist, end-to-end, every week. This modern, non-professional education would meet the original “Greek life purpose” of a liberal arts education, updated for today’s world.The most important things for a general, non-professional or vocational education are critical thinking and problem-solving skills, familiarity with logic and the scientific process, and the ability to use these in forming opinions, discourse, and in making decisions. Other general skills that are also important include — but are not limited to — interpersonal skills and communication skills .So what is wrong with today’s typical liberal arts degree?Neither the old definition of liberal arts nor the current implementation of it is the best use of four years of somebody’s education (if it is to be non-professional). The hardest (and most lucrative) problems to solve are non-technical problems. In my opinion, getting a STEM degree gives you the tools to think about those problems more effectively than a liberal arts degree today; though it is far from a complete way of thinking, and a liberal science degree will do this in an even more complete form.Some of you will point to very successful people who’ve gone to Yale and done well, but you don’t understand statistics. A lot of successful people have started out as liberal arts majors. A lot haven’t. If you’re very driven and intelligent or lucky, you’ll probably be successful in life, even with today’s liberal arts degree. Then again, if you’re that driven and intelligent, you could probably find success with any degree, or even no degree. Apple’s Steve Jobs and Joi Ito (Director of the MIT media lab) are both college dropouts. Joi is a largely self-taught computer scientist, disc jockey, nightclub entrepreneur and technology investor. The top 20% of people in any cohort will do well independent of what curriculum their education follows, or if they had any education at all. If we want to maximize the potential of the other 80%, then we need a new Liberal Sciences curriculum.Yale just decided that Computer Science was important and I like to ask, “if you live in France, shouldn’t you learn French? If you live in the computer world, shouldn’t you learn Computer Science?” What should be the second required language in schools today if we live in a computer world? And if you live in a technology world what must you understand? Traditional education is far behind and the old world tenured professors at our universities with their parochial views and interests will keep dragging them back. My disagreement is not with the goals of a liberal arts education but its implementation and evolution (or lack thereof) from 18th century European education and its purpose. There is too little emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills in schools, even though that was the original goal of such education. Many adults have little understanding of important science and technology issues or, more importantly, how to approach them, which leaves them open to poor decision-making on matters that will affect both their families and society in general.Connections matter and many Ivy League colleges are worth it just to be an alumnus. There are people with the view that liberal arts broadened their vision and gave them great conversational topics. There are those who argue that the humanities are there to teach us what to do with knowledge. As one observer commented: “They should get lawyers to think whether an unjust law is still law. An engineer could contemplate whether Artificial Intelligence is morally good. An architect could pause to think on the merit of building a house fit for purpose. A doctor could be taught whether and how to justify using scarce medical resources for the benefit of one patient and not another. This is the role of humanities — a supplement to STEM and the professions.”In my view creativity, humanism, and ethics are very hard to teach, whereas worldliness and many other skills supposedly taught through the liberal arts are more easily self-taught in a continuously updating fashion if one has a good quantitative, logical and scientific process-oriented base education.The argument goes that a scientific/engineering education lacks enough training in critical thinking skills, creativity, inspiration, innovation and holistic thinking . On the contrary, I argue that the scientific and logical basis of a better liberal sciences education would allow some or all of this — and in a more consistent way. The argument that being logical makes one a linear problem solver and ill prepared for professions that require truly creative problem solving has no merit in my view. The old version of the Liberal Arts curriculum was reasonable in a world of the far less complex 18th century Euro-centric world and an elitist education focused on thinking and leisure. Since the 20th century, despite it’s goals, it has evolved as the “easier curriculum” to get through college and may now be the single biggest reason students pursue it.I do not believe that today’s typical liberal arts degree turns you into a more complete thinker; rather, I believe they limit the dimensionality of your thinking since you have less familiarity with mathematical models (to me it’s the dimensionality of thinking that I find deficient in many people without a rigorous education), and worse statistical understanding of anecdotes and data (which liberal arts was supposedly good at preparing students for but is actually highly deficient at). People in the humanities fields are told that they get taught analytical skills, including how to digest large volumes of information, but I find that by and large such education is poor at imparting these skills. Maybe, that was the intent but the reality is very far from this idealization (again, excluding the top 20%).There is a failing in many college programs that are not pragmatic enough to align and relate liberal arts program to the life of a working adult. From finance to media to management and administration jobs, necessary skills like strategic-thinking, finding trends, and big-picture problem-solving have all evolved in my view to need the more quantitative preparation than today’s degrees provide.Such skills, supposedly the purview of liberal arts education, are best learnt through more quantitative methods today. Many vocational programs from engineering to medicine also need these same skills and need to evolve and broaden to add to their training. But if I could only have one of a liberal arts or an engineering/science education, I’d pick the engineering even if I never intended to work as an engineer and did not know what career I wanted to pursue.I have in fact almost never worked as an engineer but deal exclusively with risk, evolution of capability, innovation, people evaluation, creativity and vision formulation. That is not to say that goal setting, design, and creativity are not important or even critical. In fact these need to be added to most professional and vocational degrees, which are also deficient for today’s practical careers.More and more fields are becoming very quantitative, and it’s becoming harder and harder to go from majoring in English or history to having optionality on various future careers and being an intelligent citizen in a democracy. Math, statistics and science are hard, and school is a great time to learn those areas, whereas many of the liberal arts courses can be pursued after college on the base of a broad education. But without training in the scientific process, logic and critical thinking, discourse and understanding are both made far more difficult.A good illustrative example of the problems of today’s liberal arts education can be found in the writing of well-known author, Malcolm Gladwell, a history major and a one-time writer for The New Yorker. Gladwell famously argued that stories were more important that accuracy or validity without even realizing it. The New Republic called the final chapter of Gladwell’sOutliers, “impervious to all forms of critical thinking” and said that Gladwell believes “a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.” Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake in which Gladwell refers to “eigenvalue” as “Igon Value,” Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: “I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.” Unfortunately too many in today’s media are similarly “uneducated” in their interpretation of experts. Storytelling and quotes become a misleading factor instead of being an aid to communicating the accurate facts more easily. His assertions around “10,000 hours” may or may not be true but his arguments for it carry very little weight with me because of the quality of his thinking.Though one example of Malcolm Gladwell does not prove the invalidity of arguments for a Liberal Arts degree, I find this kind of erroneous thinking (anecdotally) true of many humanities and liberal arts graduates. In fact I see the inconsistencies that Gladwell failed to understand (giving him the benefit of the doubt that these were unintentional) in the writings of many authors of articles in supposedly elite publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Again this is not a statistically valid conclusion but the impression across hundreds or thousands of examples of one person. When I do occasionally read articles from these publications, I make a sport of judging the quality of thinking of the writers as I read, based on false arguments, unsupported conclusions, confusion of story telling with factual assertions, mistaking quotes from interviews as facts, misinterpreting statistics, etc. Similar lack of cogent thinking leads to bad decisions, uninformed rhetoric, and lack of critical thinking around topics like nuclear power and GMOs.Unfortunately in an increasingly complex world, all these topics skills that many liberal arts majors even at elite universities fail to muster. The topic of risk and risk assessment from simple personal financial planning to societal topics like income inequality is so poorly understood and considered by most liberal arts majors as to make me pessimistic. I am not arguing that engineering or STEM education is good at these topics but rather that this is not its intent of STEM or professional education. The intent of Liberal Arts education is what Steven Pinker called a “building a self” and I would add “for the technological and dynamically evolving 21st century”.Learning new areas as career paths and interests evolve becomes harder. Traditional European liberal arts education was for the few and the elite. Is that still the goal today? People spend years and a small fortune or lifelong indebtedness to obtain it and employability should be a criterion in addition to an educations’ contribution to intelligent citizenry.Wikipedia defines “the liberal arts as those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music, and astronomy also played a (somewhat lesser) part in education.” Today’s ideal list, not anchored in “classical antiquity”would be more expansive and more prioritized in my view.Idealists and those who perceive liberal arts education today as meeting these goals are wrong not in it’s intent but in assessing how well it does this function (and that is an assertion/opinion). I agree that we need a more humanistic education but it is hard to agree or disagree with the current curriculum without defining what humanistic means. Does it really teach critical thinking, logic or the scientific process, things every citizen should know in order to participate in society? Does it allow for intelligent discourse or decision-making across a diverse set of beliefs, situations, preferences, and assumptions?Should we teach our students what we already know, or prepare them to discover more? Memorizing the Gettysburg address is admirable but ultimately worthless; understanding history is interesting, even useful, but not as relevant as topics from the Economist. A student who can apply the scientific process or employ critical thinking skills to solve a big problem has the potential to change the world (or at minimum get a better-paying job). They can actually debate a topic like #blacklivesmatter, income inequality or Climate Change without being subject to “Trumpism” or emotion and biases-based distortions. No wonder half the college graduates who fill jobs as some studies indicate, actually fill jobs that don’t need a college degree! Their degree is not relevant to adding value to an employer (though that is not the only purpose of a degree).Further, even if an ideal curriculum can be stitched together, most liberal arts majors infrequently do it. If the goal is not professional education then it must be general education, which requires many more must-have requirements for me to consider a university degree respectable. Of course others are entitled to their own opinion, though the right answer is testable if one agrees that the goals of such an education are intelligent citizenry and/or employability.For now I am mostly leaving aside matters related to professional, vocational or technical curriculum. I’m also ignoring the not irrelevant and pragmatic issues of education affordability and the burden of student debt, which would argue for a more employment-enabling type of education. The failure I am referring to are two-fold: (1) the failure of curriculums to keep up with the changing needs of modern society and (2) liberal arts becoming the “easy curriculum” for those who shy away from the more demanding majors and prefer an easier, often (but not always) more socially-oriented college life. Ease, not value, or interest instead of value become key criteria in designing a curriculum for many students today. And for those of you who think this is not true, I am asserting based on my experience this is true for the majority of today’s students, but not for every liberal arts student.Not every course is for every student but the criteria need to match the needs of the student and not their indulgences, taking interests and capability into account. “Pursue your passion” even if it increases the probability of getting you into unemployment or homelessness later is advice I have seldom agreed with (yes there are occasions this is warranted, especially for the top or the bottom 20% of students). More on passions later but I’m not saying passions are unimportant. What I am saying is with today’s implementation of a liberal arts curriculum, even at elite universities like Stanford and Yale, I find that many liberal arts majors (excluding roughly the top 20% of students) lack the ability to rigorously defend ideas, make compelling, persuasive arguments, or discourse logically.Steven Pinker — in addition to refuting Gladwell — has a brilliant, clarion opinion on what education ought to be, writing in The New Republic, “It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.”Though I agree, I am not sure this curriculum is more important than the ideas below. Based on the skills defined below any gaps in the above education can be filled in by students post graduation.So what should non-professional elite education entail?If we had enough time in school, I would suggest we do everything. Sadly that is not realistic, so we need a prioritized list of basic requirements because every subject we do cover excludes some other subject given the fixed time we have available. We must decide what is better taught during the limited teaching time we have, and what subjects are easier learnt during personal time or as post-education or graduate pursuits.In the new Liberal Science curriculum I propose, students would master:1. The fundamental tools of learning and analysis, primarily critical thinking, the scientific process or methodology, and approaches to problem solving and diversity.2. Knowledge of a few generally applicable topics and knowledge of the basics such as logic, mathematics, and statistics to judge and model conceptually almost anything one might run into over the next few decades.3. The skills to “dig deep” into their areas of interest in order to understand how these tools can be applied to one domain and to be equipped to change domains every so often4. Preparation for jobs in a competitive and evolving global economy or preparation for uncertainty about one’s future direction, interest, or areas where opportunities will exist.5. Preparation to continuously evolve and stay current as informed and intelligent citizens of a democracyCritical subject matter should include economics, statistics, mathematics, logic and systems modeling, psychology, computer programming, and current (not historical) cultural evolution (Why rap? Why ISIS? Why suicide bombers? Why the Kardasians and Trump? Why environmentalism and what matters and what does not? And of course the question, are the answers to these questions expert opinions or have some other validity?).Furthermore, certain humanities disciplines such as literature and history should become optional subjects, in much the same way that physics is today (and, of course, I advocate mandatory basic physics study along with the other sciences). And one needs the ability to think through many, if not most, of the social issues we face (which the softer liberal arts subjects ill-prepare one for in my view).Imagine a required course each semester where every student is asked to analyze and debate topics from every issue of a broad publication such as The Economist or Technology Review. And imagine a core curriculum that teaches the core skills to have the discussions above. Such a curriculum would not only provide a platform for understanding in a more relevant context how the physical, political, cultural and technical worlds function, but would also impart instincts for interpreting the world, and prepare students to become active participants in the economy.It would be essential to understand psychology because human behavior and human interaction are important and will continue to be so. I’d like people who are immune to the fallacies and agendas of the media, politicians, advertisers, and marketers because these professions have learned to hack the human brain’s biases (a good description of which are described in Dan Kannehman’s Thinking Fast & Slow and in Dan Gardner’s The Science of Fear). I’d like to teach people how to understand history but not to spend time getting the knowledge of history, which can be done after graduation.I’d like people to read a New York Times article and understand what is an assumption, what’s an assertion by the writer, what are facts, and what are opinions, and maybe even find the biases and contradictions inherent in many articles. We are far beyond the days of the media simply reporting news, shown by the different versions of the “news” that liberal and conservative newspapers in the US report, all as different “truths” of the same event. Learning to parse this media is critical. I’d like people to understand what is statistically valid and what is not. What is a bias or the color of the writer’s point of view.Students should learn the scientific method, and most importantly how to apply its mental model to the world. The scientific method requires that hypotheses be tested in controlled conditions; this can diminish the effects of randomness and, often, personal bias. This is very valuable in a world where too many students fall victim to confirmation biases (people observe what they expect to observe), appeal to new and surprising things, and narrative fallacies (once a narrative has been built, it’s individual elements are more accepted). There are many, many types of human biases defined in psychology that people fall victim to. Failure to understand mathematical models and statistics makes it substantially more difficult to understand critical questions in daily life, from social sciences to science and technology, political issues, health claims and much more.I’d also suggest tackling several general and currently relevant topic areas such as genetics, computer science, systems modeling, econometrics, linguistics modeling, traditional and behavioral economics, and genomics/bioinformatics (not an exhaustive list) which are quickly becoming critical issues for everyday decisions from personal medical decisions to understanding minimum pay, economics of taxes and inequality, immigration, or climate change. E.O. Wilson argues in his book “The Meaning of Human Existence” that it is hard to understand social behavior without understanding multi-level selection theory and the mathematical optimization that nature performed through years of evolutionary iterations. I am not arguing that every educated person should be able to build such a model but rather that they should be able to “think” such a model qualitatively.Not only do these topics expose students to a lot of useful and current information, theories, and algorithms, they may in fact become platforms to teach the scientific process — a process that applies to (and is desperately needed for) logical discourse as much as it applies to science. The scientific process critically needs to be applied to all the issues we discuss socially in order to have intelligent dialog. Even if the specific information becomes irrelevant within a decade (who knows where technology will head next; hugely important cultural phenomena and technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone didn’t exist before 2004, after all), it’s incredibly useful to understand the current frontiers of science and technology as building blocks for the future.It’s not that history or Kafka are not important, but rather it is even more critical to understand if we change the assumptions, environmental conditions and rules that applied to historical events, that would alter the conclusions we draw from historical events today. Every time a student takes one subject they exclude the possibility of taking something else. I find it ironic that those who rely on “history repeating itself” often fail to understand the assumptions that might cause “this time” to be different. The experts we rely on for predictions have about the same accuracy as dart-throwing monkeys according to at least one very exhaustive study by Prof Phil Tetlock. So it is important to understand how to rely on “more likely to be right” experts, as defined in the book Superforecasters. We make a lot of judgments in everyday life and we should be prepared to make them intelligently.Students can use this broad knowledge base to build mental models that will aid them in both further studies and vocations. Charlie Munger, the famous investor from Berkshire Hathaway, speaks about mental models and what he calls “elementary, worldly wisdom.” Munger believes a person can combine models from a wide range of disciplines (economics, mathematics, physics, biology, history, and psychology, among others) into something that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. I have to agree that this cross-disciplinary thinking is becoming an essential skill in today’s increasingly complex world.“The models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department,” Munger explains. “That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines… These models generally fall into two categories: (1) ones that help us simulate time (and predict the future) and better understand how the world works (e.g. understanding a useful idea from like autocatalysis), and (2) ones that help us better understand how our mental processes lead us astray (e.g., availability bias).” I would add that they provide the “common truth” in discussions where the well educated discussants disagree.After grasping the fundamental tools of learning and some broad topical exposure, it’s valuable to “dig deep” in one or two topic areas of interest. For this, I prefer some subject in science or engineering rather than literature or history (bear with me before you have an emotional reaction; I’ll explain in a minute). Obviously, it’s best if students are passionate about a specific topic, but it’s not critical as the passion may develop as they dig in (some students will have passions, but many won’t have any at all). The real value for digging deep is to learn how to dig in; it serves a person for the duration of their life: in school, work, and leisure. As Thomas Huxley said, “learn something about everything and everything about something,” though his saying that does not make it true. Too often, students don’t learn that a quote is not a fact.If students choose options from traditional liberal-education subjects, they should be taught in the context of the critical tools mentioned above. If students want jobs, they should be taught skills where future jobs will exist. If we want them as intelligent citizens, we need to have them understand critical thinking, statistics, economics, how to interpret technology and science developments, and how global game theory applies to local interests. Traditional majors like international relations and political science are passé as base skills and can easily be acquired once a student has the basic tools of understanding. And they and many other traditional liberal arts subjects like history or art will be well served in graduate level work. I want to repeat that this is not to claim those “other subjects” are not valuable. I think they are very appropriate for graduate level study.Back to history and literature for a moment — these are great to wrestle with once a student has learned to think critically. My contention is not that these subjects are unimportant, but rather that they are not basic or broad enough “tools for developing learning skills” as they were in the 1800s, because the set of skills needed today has changed. Furthermore, they are topics easily learned by someone trained in the basic disciplines of thinking and learning that I’ve defined above. This isn’t as easy the other way around. A scientist can more easily become a philosopher or writer than a writer or philosopher can become a scientist.If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies. This can do a lot of damage.Separating the aspirational claims by universities from the reality of today’s typical liberal arts education I tend to agree with the views of William Deresiewicz. He was an English professor at Yale from 1998–2008 and recently published the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.” Deresiewicz writes on the current state of liberal arts, “At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. There are exceptions, of course, but professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a ‘nonaggression pact.’” Easy is often the reason students pick liberal arts subjects today.Lots of things are important but what are the most important goals of an education?To repeat, school is a place where every student should have the opportunity to become a potential participant in whatever they might want to tackle in the future, with an appropriate focus not only on what they want to pursue but also, pragmatically, what they will need to do to be productively employed or productive and thinking member of society. By embracing thinking and learning skills, and adding a dash of irreverence and confidence that comes from being able to tackle new arenas (creative writing as a vocational skill, not a liberal arts education, may have a role here, but Macbeth does not make my priority list; we can agree to disagree but if we discourse I want to understand the assumptions that cause us to disagree, something many students are unable to do), hopefully they will be lucky enough to help shape the next few decades or at least be intelligent voters in a democracy and productive participants in their jobs .With the right critical lens, history, philosophy, and literature can help creativity and breadth by opening the mind to new perspectives and ideas. Still, learning about them is secondary to learning the tools of learning except possibly the right approach to philosophy education. Again I want to remind you that none of this applies to the top 20% of students who learn all these skills independent of their education or major. Passions like music or literature (leaving aside the top few students who clearly excel at music or literature) and its history may be best left to self-pursuit, while exploring the structure and theory of music or literature may be a way to teach the right kind of thinking about music and literature!For some small subset of the student body, pursuing passions and developing skills in subjects such as music or sports can be valuable, and I am a fan of schools like Juilliard, but in my view this must be in addition to a required general education especially for the “other 80%”. It’s the lack of balance in general education which I am suggesting needs to be addressed (including for engineering, science and technology subjects’ students. Setting music and sports aside, with the critical thinking tools and exposure to the up-and-coming areas mentioned above, students should be positioned to discover their first passion and begin to understand themselves, or at the least be able to keep up with the changes to come, get (and maintain) productive jobs, and be intelligent citizens.At the very least they should be able to evaluate how much confidence to place in a New York Times study of 11 patients on a new cancer treatment from Mexico or a health supplement from China and to assess the study’s statistical validity and whether the treatment’s economics make sense. And they should understand the relationship between taxes, spending, balanced budgets, and growth better than they understand 15th century English history in preparation for “civic life” to quote the original purpose of a liberal arts education. And if they are to study language or music, Dan Levitin’s book “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” should be first reading or its equivalent in linguistics. It can teach you about a human obsession but also teach you how to build a mathematical model in your head and why and how Indian music is different than Latin music. In fact, these should be required for all education, not just liberal arts education, along with the other books mentioned above.The role of passion and emotion in life is best epitomized by a quote (unknown source) I once saw that says the most important things in life are best decided by the heart and not logic. For the rest we need logic and consistency. The “what” may be emotion and passion based but the “how” often (yes, sometimes the journey is the reward) needs a different approach that intelligent citizens should possess and education should teach.I am sure I have missed some points of view, so I look forward to starting a valuable dialogue on this important topic.