Comment by voidhorse

I haven't used LLMs too much for study yet, so maybe they really are force multipliers, but I completely disagree with your assessment of self-directed learning pre-llm, the paving forward part isn't so dire.

The internet, and esp. stack exchange is a horrible place to learn concepts. For basic operational stuff, sure that works, but one should mostly be picking up concepts form books and other long form content. When you get stuck it's time to do three things:

Incorporate a new source that covers the same material in a different way, or at least from a different author.

Sit down with the concept and write about it and actively try to reformulate it and everything you do/don't understand in your own words.

Take a pause and come back later.

Usually one of these three strategies does the trick, no llm required. Obviously these approaches require time that using an LLM wouldn't. I have a suspicion doing it this way will also make it stick in long term memory better, but that's just a hunch.