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Easy to conflate — they share the didact- root but operate on different sides of the agency split:
instruct*. The work teaches you. Agency is in the object; you receive the lesson.
yourself. Agency is in the subject; you generate the lesson.
A learner who reads a didactic book is being taught by the book. A learner who practices auto-didacticism is teaching themselves (possibly using didactic books as raw material, but the learning itself is self-driven).
These are complementary, not interchangeable. The two concepts were explicitly distinguished in a 2026-07-14 conversation that also surfaced the person-vs-material polarity of didactic (person = negative, thing = positive / neutral). See the related concept page for full notes.
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