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18I worry this answer over-emphasizes the possibility of success without training. These cases are notable and remarkable specifically because they are so rare. It's the same selection-bias issue as some article saying that the key to making it rich is to be a high school dropout, because Steve Jobs dropped out of high school and made it rich. It isn't that that path is not the easiest or safest, it's that it is guaranteed to fail out to several decimal points of precision.– Bryan Krause ♦Commented Jun 14, 2022 at 21:42
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@BryanKrause Maybe it's important to enumerate all the possibilities here, otherwise there is room to imagine the answer has forgotten about those who did, remarkably, manage without formal education. Everything about Steve Job's life is "long tail of the bell curve" but on the scale of all humans, someone was likely to be there.– Clumsy catCommented Jun 16, 2022 at 8:31
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3@Clumsycat Way more time is already spent talking about those unusual cases than is spent talking about all the failed cases that were misled into following their footsteps.– Bryan Krause ♦Commented Jun 16, 2022 at 14:22
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@BryanKrause, perhaps the issue here is that you and I are in very different fields with very different research processes. I tend to see the possibility of it, and you probably see the difficulty. I'd guess biology is much harder for independent researchers than math, not because of the essence of the ideas, but the support required to develop them.– BuffyCommented Jun 17, 2022 at 13:14
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