here's some offhand thoughts that take too much effort to glue together
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it sucks having to explain to some rando how to do something in its entirety. it's extremely natural for anyone to feel like replying "just google it" to an overly broad request for help on a forum, reddit thread, etc.
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simply reading about something, beginning from first principles, can be valuable but is often incredibly inefficient compared to learning from an expert who will tell you what you need to know rather than everything, and will give you errata that wouldn't be in the formal literature, and will help you head off errors before you make them, and may even give you feedback and approval.
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it is extremely natural to want to learn everything through apprenticeship instead of "rtfm"
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the only reason anyone disagrees on any of this is because the internet put so many people looking for a mentor in front of so few mentors that everyone rejected these truths in self defense
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that's a bummer
this really hits because I found that I really struggle to learn things in a non-interactive way (i.e. reading a document rather than being able to directly engage with something or ask questions). There are things I spent hours struggling to understand that clicked for me in 5 minutes of talking to someone who could explain the exact part I'm interested in.
