Earlier quoted context omitted.
No meaningful disussion can come from this. Other students went to the same school I'm sure. Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The question whether you should get university education is not an easy one. I'm strugling with it all the time and I am going to an university.
> Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The point isn't that Fabrice Bellard isn't special. It's that even a special (clearly brilliant and self-directed) guy like him can arguably benefit from the systematic learning of domain specific information that happens at a university. It could be the case that had Bellard not gone to university, he would have gone to t…
I never attended college. I'm entirely self-taught. I've had a successful career.
For the first two-thirds of my career I was awfully satisfied with my own ability to assimilate and apply books, docs and discussion to my work - seemingly much faster than anyone I worked with.
Eventually, I found myself working on big, unique, urgent problems with a guy who was both college educated and had exceptional ability.
For the longest time I'd had ideas without the words to describe them. I could run something past this guy and almost always get a response like "What you're describing here is a..."
We ended up having hours of discussions that amounted to a crash course in computer science, all sorts of higher math, history and philosophy. Our talks didn't just teach me directly, they gave me conceptual footholds to make the next logical leaps - completely expanded my horizon.
I suddenly realized just how much I didn't know and how hard it is to even know where to look in order to learn.
I didn't need a structured education to be effective, but I can certainly see how it would enable an exceptional person to be that much better.