Autodidacticism by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
There are two types of people:
  • those who are autodidacts
  • those who didn't really learn
Some possible definitions:
  • learning without a gun pointed at your head
  • learning from an e-book or video rather than from a talking head 5 rows of chairs in front of you
    How that is different from a video, you tell me.
Year On by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Learning Approach Uncollege by Dale Stephens (2011)
Source.
Thiel Fellowship by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli approves of this one, related: Section "Free gifted education".
The downside of the Thiel Fellowship is that it is realistically impossible for its fellows to do anything in deep tech, only information science startups would be possible, as they would not have the labs, or lab skills required for any deep tech if they drop out before a PhD. Related: Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories".
The only solution is the harder process of actually remodelling our very broken educational system.
Binet Gaussienne by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is likely a joke binet, but the idea is epic: its members would in principle take the hardest courses and purposefully get bad grades on them to improve the grades of others, as grades are always normalized to a normal distribution.
  • always upvote questions you care about, to increase the probability that they will get answered
  • never upvote other people's answers unless you might gain from it somehow, otherwise you are just giving other high reputation users more reputation relative to you
  • only mark something to close or as a duplicate if it will bring you some advantage, because closing things creates enemies, especially if the OP has a high profile
    One example advantage is if you have already answered the question (and the duplicate as well in case of duplicates), because this will prevent competitors from adding new better answers to overtake you.
  • protect questions you've answered whenever someone with less than 10 reputation answers it with a bad answer, to prevent other good contributors from coming along and beating you
  • when you find a duplicate pool answer every question with similar answers.
    Alter each answer slightly to avoid the idiotic duplicate answer detector.
    If one of the question closes, it is not too bad, as it continues netting you to upvotes, and prevents new answers from coming in.
  • follow on Twitter/RSS someone who comments on the top features of new software releases. E.g. for Git, follow GitHub on Twitter, C++ on Reddit. Then run back to any question which has a new answer.
  • always upvote the question when you answer it:
    • the more upvotes, more likely people are to click it.
    • the OP is more likely to see your answer and feel good and upvote you
  • if a niche question only has few answers and you come with a good one, upvote the existing ones by other high profile users.
    This may lead to them upvoting or liking you.
    Even if they don't, other people will still see your answer anyway, and this will lead to people to upvoting you more just to make your great answer surpass the current ones, especially if the accepted one has less upvotes than yours. Being second is often an asset.
  • always upvote comments that favor you:
    • "I like this answer!" on your answers
    • "also look at that question" when you have answered that question
  • don't invest a lot in edits. They don't give you rep, and they can get reverted and waste your time.
    Why are you trying to help other people's answers to get rep anyways? Just make a separate answer instead! :-)
  • if you answer a question by newbie without 15 reputation, find their other questions if any and upvote them, so that the OP can upvote your answer in addition to just accepting
  • If you haven't answered a question, link to related questions you've answered on question comments, so more people will come to your answers.
    If you have answered the question, only link to other questions at the bottom of your answer, so that people won't go away before they reach your answer, and so as to strengthen your answer.
  • if a question has 50 million answers and you answer it (often due to a new feature), make a comment on the question pointing to your answer
  • if you get a downvote, always leave a comment asking why. It is not because you care about their useless opinion, but because other readers might see the comment, feel sorry for you, and upvote.
  • ask any questions under a separate anonymous accounts. Because:
    • intelligent people are born knowing, and don't ever ask any questions, so that would hurt your reputation
    • downvoting questions does not take 1 reputation away from the downvoter, and so it greatly opens the door for your opponents to downvote you without any cost.
Paulo Freire by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire:
During his childhood and adolescence, Freire ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick-up football with other poor children, from whom he claims to have learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. These experiences influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: "I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge"
OMG so nice.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact