Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
johnsalvatier.org
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
1–10 of 304 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#2This here is why estimation of tasks (in software) is IMHO futile hand waving. There is always unknown unknowns, snags and hangups which may surprise everyone.
Everybody who actually creates or makes something can agree that that stuff is hard, really hard but oh so rewarding!
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#3TL:DR; Hofstadter's law.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#4People are surprisingly unimaginative about the richness of reality.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#5TL:DR; Hofstadter's law.
I think you might be leaving out some detail
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#6This resonates so well with Engineering in an unexpected way for me: the "production" version is orders of magnitude harder than the prototype. I kist expected it to be plainly harder.
I'm not talking just about programming. At my University I used to make robot arms and RC stuff with my classmates. Polystyrene, Arduino and a lot of duck tape were our friends, winning even a NASA competition. It was actually quite fun and fairly easy.
After finishing and while I was freelancing, I tried to take it to the next level. Once you get to rigid pieces and tight couplings, there is a huge amount of details and gears that I don't even know how to start searching for. What I learned at my University (Industrial Engineering) won't work as well, since I am not ready to order 10000s of pieces.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#7I'd say "fiddliness" is a characteristic of happiness and focused work.
If you overlook most details you are basically just 'doing stuff to get objectives done', which is meager imho.
Getting acquainted with detail takes us away from the vast sameness that we experience when we are just running on automatic and helps us cherish and savor each moment as complexity unfurls.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#8There's something of a connection here to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two examples come to mind:
1. The narrator thinks it's important to have in your toolset hammers of multiple hardness, because your hammer should be softer than whatever material you're hammering on at the time.
At least, that's how I remember it; I might well be wrong about -- well, about the DETAILS of that example. Please correct me if I am.
2. A student gets and assignment to write an essay about a particular brick wall. He can't see how to fill the assigned length with anything interesting.
The instructor then says OK, write instead only about the left-topmost brick. The student has so much to say about it he has trouble making his essay SHORT enough to meet the assignment's requirements.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#9Awesome post! Personally, I've experienced this in academia, with me being the culprit but also in a team setting.
Fresh graduates, seem to be convinced that their narrow-scope textbook knowledge can conquer the world! I've studied Electromagnetism, one would exclaim! How hard can the software implementation be? Why should I bother with technicalities such noise introduced by the cable setup?
The moment you take a step back, realize that a real-world project has so many details, that your team can get collectively stuck, and that you might be just flat out wrong is really humbling.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#10Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know"
It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need.
Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things.
I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an inverse correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.