Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#21

Post by combatentropy » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #10

combatentropy wrote: post #8

This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship, as opposed to a lot of book-learning in the classroom. In fact I think people do still learn their jobs that way. It's just delayed by several years of book-learning that has little return on investment. When you finally land your job, your first few months are when you really start learning enough to become useful. Disclaimer: I…

> Nothing I read in a book sticks until I have tried my hand at it for a few weeks. I don't think this is universal, though. Book reading is very natural for me and sticks immediately. In fact, I often find that things I've read today and not understood become magically clear a few days later.

I can see it going both ways, depending on how narrowly you define "new thing."

I have never written a program in Go but could probably pick it up through reading, because I have years of experience with other languages. But I pity the poor programmer trying to set up everything for the first time, alone.

Or my first try at home repair was daunting. But now that I have fixed a few simple things I have a better feel for it and might be okay learning the next thing with a book.

I think this is partly why some people like watching Youtube videos and others just want an article.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#22

Post by dathinab » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

TJSomething wrote: post #19

ericb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience) I don't find this is particularly true of self-taught people. People who are raised in bad coding environments like working alone or, project-based consulting shops may have bad habits. Hint: the habits are not taught in s…

Isn't working alone part of being self-taught? My school tried to teach good habits. Many of the professors are out of touch with what good habits are though, so they usually teach to books of varying quality or practices specific to how they learned a few decades ago.

Yes, through it might also happen if you are not self thought and even if you work in teams as long as you don't do proper reviewed with time to fix non critical problems in a PR it's still like working alone. Which isn't good.

I do count school and University courses as self thought, just with a sometimes better fundation (but sadly often with a worth one too).

As long as you don't have someone who checks your code or does pair programming it's all self thought just with different sources of input.

Also school/uni projects tend to be not that useful either even if you do pair programming, because the people you pair up with have roughly the same experience like you (most times).

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#23

Post by HocusLocus » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

ivanche wrote: post #12

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #7

I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.

I think this is an argument for the "we live in a simulator" idea - details appear just when they are needed and whenever we think we completely discovered something, another layer of details opens beneath us.

Higgs Bostein (or is it Bostain?)

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#24

Post by irjustin » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

combatentropy wrote: post #8

This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship, as opposed to a lot of book-learning in the classroom. In fact I think people do still learn their jobs that way. It's just delayed by several years of book-learning that has little return on investment. When you finally land your job, your first few months are when you really start learning enough to become useful. Disclaimer: I…

This is the methodology of Gap Year[0] and ideally filled with some sort of extended internship, which I personally subscribe to even though I didn't do it - simply wish I did.

Theory is definitely fantastic, but not being exposed to the real world took me longer to come to grips with than it probably should have.

I think book-learning has great return on investments when applied critically. The problem is when it's applied dogmatically like it is today. Not everyone needs to go to college - for profit schools are scum. Universities can hardly call themselves impartial, but it still has a place and is useful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_year

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#25

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

TJSomething wrote: post #19

ericb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience) I don't find this is particularly true of self-taught people. People who are raised in bad coding environments like working alone or, project-based consulting shops may have bad habits. Hint: the habits are not taught in s…

Isn't working alone part of being self-taught? My school tried to teach good habits. Many of the professors are out of touch with what good habits are though, so they usually teach to books of varying quality or practices specific to how they learned a few decades ago.

[deleted]

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#26

Post by jacobolus » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #11

combatentropy wrote: post #8

This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship, as opposed to a lot of book-learning in the classroom. In fact I think people do still learn their jobs that way. It's just delayed by several years of book-learning that has little return on investment. When you finally land your job, your first few months are when you really start learning enough to become useful. Disclaimer: I…

I see this wrt. Software Development all the time. There are Tons of Online Curses, Books and other self learning material but: 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience) 2. Often just a view month with proper guidance can have much better effects then a year+ of sel…

I take it you are agreeing with the previous poster that hands-on apprenticeship would be a good alternative to formal study out of books. An apprenticeship (hopefully) implies a good deal of mentorship and guidance.

* * *

Personally I think “schooling” should consist much more of student-directed projects, with scope, difficulty, and autonomy gradually increasing over time.

It’s a real shame that typically the most substantial pieces of work 18-year-olds are expected to complete in school take maybe 10 or 15 hours, and most of the work students do is broken down into atomized and unrelated chunks which individually take <10 minutes with few if any decisions involved.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#27

Post by Negitivefrags » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

bertr4nd wrote: post #6

I notice this effect all the time when cooking, and the maddening part is how hard it can be to even figure out the right details. Like, the best sausages I ever cooked were at a barbecue in park, on a random public grill with no particular attention to the heat (I think the sausages caught fire briefly), and yet they were amazing . Juicy and delicious, with just the right amount of char on the outside. Over my home…

https://www.seriouseats.com/2012/05/the-food-lab-the-best-wa...

This is the article to read.

In general I can really recommend The Food Lab as the guy who does it has a very scientific approach.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#28

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #4

A related concept: tacit knowledge : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

Which is why attempts to "document all human knowledge" or whatever are always doomed to fail. We don't even know what we know. Yeah, people can print out Wikipedia and store it in diamond or whatever, but that's not what human knowledge really is.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#29

Post by chubot » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

bertr4nd wrote: post #6

I notice this effect all the time when cooking, and the maddening part is how hard it can be to even figure out the right details. Like, the best sausages I ever cooked were at a barbecue in park, on a random public grill with no particular attention to the heat (I think the sausages caught fire briefly), and yet they were amazing . Juicy and delicious, with just the right amount of char on the outside. Over my home…

Hm this reminds me of reading Salt Fat Acid Heat, and the buttermilk chicken recipe, which has only 3 ingredients (chicken, buttermilk, salt).

She says you have to orient the chicken a specific way in the oven because the corners of the oven are the hottest and the different parts of the chicken will cook evenly that way (?) Not quite sure since I didn't try it. But my friend made it and it was fantastic.

So the way I look at it (without much experience) is that a thermometer measures one dimension, while a chicken is a 3D thing. And an expert chef noticed that enough to put the detail in her recipe. i.e. "reality is complicated".

Not sure if that's the problem with sausages (since they're not that 3D) but there's a reason that specific foods are cooked in specific ovens. i.e. why do people obsess over pizza ovens and import them from Italy? Why is clay pot cooking different than metal pot cooking, etc.?

Because temperature / heat aren't just one-dimensional. She says that good cooks look at the food and not at the thermometer. They're looking for signs in the food which stay constant across environments rather than measuring one aspect of the environment.

tl;dr Samin Nosrat rejects the use of a thermometer because it doesn't measure enough reality to cook well.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#30

Post by amasad » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

I really like the essay but I think there is a form of Stockholm syndrome playing out especially with the following statements:

> using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were > If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

I think programmers think that the suckiness of their tools is a fact of the universe, when it's just that they don't know there's a better way.

At Repl.it, we built `upm` (Universal Package Manager) to make using packages a breeze with no fiddling. Ever since I started doing most of my scripting on Repl.it I almost never "fiddle" to get a package or a feature of the language to work.

upm goes as far as to guess your dependencies when you import them and will install and generate the spec and lock files. It's a truly magical experience. More here: https://repl.it/site/blog/upm

And we try to do a similar thing with every potential programming workflow. Can you make it "just work"? I think we can, for most things.