Test pilots die a lot.
Lots of things have a long history involving slow accretions of knowledge passed from individuals on down and improved along the way. The esoterica of cabinet work is an example. Secret mitred dovetail joinery would send a normal person insane, even if they thought to invent it in the first place.
And law. Autodidacts in law invariably get it madly wrong. Nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just that it is such a huge subject that all intricately fits together, and has exceptions within exceptions to the end of reckoning, that unless you are taught it in a structured way there is no prospect of getting it close to right. You rapidly wind up turning yourself into a nut-job tax protester or the equivalent. The only people motivated to teach themselves law tend to be people with an agenda, and they tend to read selectively for the bits that they think help them. Which always ends in tears.
Without “outside” help I suspect a foreign language would be impossible.
I reckon most musical instruments can be self taught to a masterful degree.
I guess that pushes the question of what it means to be self-taught. Most airplanes are inherently stable. They will just fly along if you leave them alone. Helicopters are inherently unstable which means they are a cross between an airplane and a unicycle. If you jump on a unicycle and fall off you might get hurt a little. If you hop in a helicopter and try the same, you will probably get killed.
However, helicopters are very complex machines that took many years to develop. It isn’t like the first one was built and someone hopped in and took off. There were many people involved in the construction as well as carefully planned tethered tests. I wouldn’t call that self-taught.
The U.S. FAA is very generous in allowing home-built aircraft to fly. Their philosophy is that if you can design it and build it, you can fly it and kill yourself if you want as long as you do some paperwork and allow a few inspections of your work. You can design and build a jet fighter (sans weapons) in your garage if you want. I suppose that would meet the definition in the OP but it would take a very long time and cost mega-bucks. Still, retired engineers build their own planes and teach themselves to fly them. John Denver killed himself in such an experimental plane and lots of people complete their own and successfully fly them every year.
Post. Evar. Best.
Back when I was younger my sister wanted a sailboat. We found one for sale in the want ads and my dad bought it. My sister went to the library and got a book on sailing. That Saturday we headed down to the LA harbor to go sailing.
So picture this, we get there, my 17 year old high school cheerleader sister is in her bikini. We are setting up the boat prior to launching. There is a group of Sea Scouts nearby about to launch their sailboat. How they could get it ready without taking their eyes off of my sister is still a mystery.
Anyway my sister goes over, book in hand, to ask if they have any advice.
Their answer was a classic. Throw the book in the harbor, get in and sail.
So we did. Took maybe a half an hour and we had it down. Easy.
Hard on the other hand is landing a plane. I got some bootleg time in a real live commercial flight simulator. Take offs? Easy. Flying? Easy. Landing? Damn difficult with no instruction. I got to fly the thing through 4 take offs and landings. On the first landing they would have used dustpans to pick up the pieces. The second landing, they might have needed heavy equipment. The third landing somebody might have survived. For the 4th landing, the instructor (who had given me no instructions prior to any of these debacles) put me in fog, and told me to fly the glass cockpit. Nintendo! I flew the instruments right down to the ground and greased the landing. The instructor complemented me on that landing and said it was better than many of the paying students do the first time in fog. 
I grew up on the coast of North Carolina. Between the mainland and the barrier islands, we had about a mile of marsh and water. We also had a seven foot styrofoam sailboat that my father had re-enforced with fiberglass so that it would last more than one summer. That thing taught us to sail.
It was digital. If it dumped you in the water, you did it wrong. if it didn’t dump you, you must be doing something right. Learning different gradiations of doing something right came slower.
As far as languages: I think a person can learn grammar and vocabulary by himself. But pronuciation must be learned from someone else.
Actually not; never more than once each.
I taught myself to quarry blast. Thankfully, quarries are in very rural areas. I’m much better now :smack:
I taught myself to sail. Rented a cat and away I went. Same with a jetski. Though I’ve down 10 years of several hours ATV riding a day, so I guess that’s cheating.
A contractor told me to jump in his excavator and finish off, as it was pub time for him. Though I couldn’t get all the soil back into the hole he dug, it was fun. Same guy made me drive his Mack too. No instruction, though I knew not to try to move it (i.e. stall it) until the air pressure built back up as it had an air starter (there are only a couple of starts in the tank, then you got to use one of the tyres :eek: )
Just built a PC Wednesday. MB died, so bought a bunch of bits (reused only the case and DVDRW). Never done that before, but I’ve installed many an OS. So I carefully read all the handbooks with each componet and went forit. Man, this system now rocks. Next plan is to program a Picaxe. Still figuring that projects code.
OK. I can imagine this.
Although I’m extremely analytical, I’m an idiot when it comes to sail a catamaran. I’ve owned one for 10 years and I still suck at it. Without a video or someone showing me, I doubt I’d ever have gotten past the surf zone without having destroyed the boat or killed myself. I probably would have had better luck on a lake, but the ocean was pretty challenging for me. I’m sure I’d never have been able to figure out how to turn into the wind without someone showing me how. In my own defense, I’ve never sailed a monohull.
I’m pretty sure I could have never learned to snowboard without a lesson, especially because I never skateboarded as a kid and started when I was an old fart. I’m still no good, but have gotten a little better. I recommend a lesson. My friend was so beat up after trying it out in the morning, he was too sore and humiliated to even make it to his group lesson. He’s never tried it again, but he’s old like me.
I did learn how to ride a unicycle without a lesson though, but not particularly well.
It wasn’t much of a flight. Or much of a helicopter.
Liked glad it somebody.
I doubt it. It would be hard to learn a completely unfamiliar language by total immersion, but not impossible - as long as there is a rich context of actions, gestures, objects - and as long as the language doesn’t have some bizarre and utterly alien logic to it*, I think it must be possible to gain it in at least a minimally functional way.
*For example, if repeated phrases used different words each time they were reiterated (i.e. words for “apple, the first time I ask you”, “apple, the second time I ask you”, etc), or a vast arrray of different words depending on tiny minutiae of context (i.e. distinct words for “apple, when I want one”, “apple, when I don’t want one”, “apple, when I mention it on a Wednesday and the sun is shining”, etc)
Either it was ready before you arrived, or they launched without a rudder and the mast promptly fell down…
We stand on the shoulders of giants! But also on the shoulders of crazy people, obsessives and foolish geniuses. One of my favourites is Haldane:"Haldane was a keen experimenter, willing to expose himself to danger to obtain data. (SNIP) In his decompression chamber experiments, he and his volunteers suffered perforated eardrums, but, as Haldane stated in What is Life, “the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”"
Gotta admit that I liked it, however I was afraid that it was unintentional (legit brain injury). So I looked up your other posts, saw that they were “normal”, then had my laugh.
This may once have been true, but music education has raised the bar of professionalism. Nowadays a certain rigor is assumed of good musicians - you really can’t have any gaps in your technique or training. If you do, you can play as “masterfully” as you please and not be accorded the respect that a less talented and more trained player will get.
Teaching yourself to read a foreign language is very easy. One you know your language’s translation of the foreign word, it’s good to go.
Learning to speak a foreign language without outside help is simply impossible.
I don’t think so. Most instruments have been around a while, and musicians have invented mountains of technique to go with each one. I don’t think you could pick this up by yourself, or with a book, or even with recordings.
Absolutely. That’s why good violin playing is so much more than playing the violin well. There are 300+ years of tradition, esthetic, and ethos attached to it, and you better show you respect that tradition, or go find some instrument with less of it to master.