As someone who had constructed a stair once, I fully support the author. Any activity has lots of small and non-obvious details, which stop you from doing anything right when you stumble in then, and which seem easy and trivial in the hindsight. I guess, that's why it is called "know-how".
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#32This essay has a taste of “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”. Really enjoyable and authentic style.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#33This 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…
Wow I couldn’t agree more! I found myself bored in school and often would skip class to go to my off campus job to make money. I was poor and wanted the short-sighted immediate success of income.
However, looking back I regret not taking classes that actually interested me. My school (like I would presume most) had a rigorous course schedule that one needed to adhere to in order to graduate. I think in taking classes I was actually interested in I would have (and the ones I took in the curriculum that I was interested in I got A’s) done much better overall.
Maybe I should have gone to a liberal arts school? Either way I’ve supplanted my lack of A’s with lots of books. It’s made up a lot of the difference so far!
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#34I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.
I think it's one of the more fundamental meta-learnings, meaning: learn a few different things and then compare the processes (of learning) with each other and you find that they all share the quality that if you pay attention to anything the details expand. This is true of physical things like making stairs but also of mental "things" like programming, or poetry.
The fundamental "direction" is in-out; outward there's this multimodal unbounded fractal, inward there is Self-Awareness, the "infinity shot" of consciousness.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'm the complete opposite. I'm convinced my brain has some kind of overly aggressive internal garbage collection. Knowledge/tools that I haven't derived utility/benefit from get purged. I will say that something I've book-learned in the past can be re-learned more rapidly if I run into that problem in the future, but it's grossly inefficient and of little benefit.
I have found this to be true, but I think the key to absorbing things is to figure out how to associate it with benefit/utility.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#36I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.
FWIW I think that simulation theory is fairly obviously bunk, but that's not really an argument. We have no frame of reference for the nature of the simulator, including its constraints and the level of detail it can manage.
Why do you think it’s “obviously bunk”?
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#37This 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 am, sort of, doing an apprenticeship right now. We are building an indoor aquaponics pilot (290 m2/3100 sqft facility). Aquaponics is growing fish, bacteria and vegetables in a recirculating water based system.
We are doing this “from scratch” (obviously buying pumps, sensors, tanks etc of the shelf). At the same time I am learning aquaculture (growing fish) in a formal two semester course, as well as reading a bunch of books on the subject. We are also planning an insect larvae farm, to use food waste as feed, to partially feed the fish.
It turns out there is a massive amount of things to learn. I am lucky my colleagues are full of different expertise than what I have. The know how to grow plants, build buildings, mechanical engineering, electronics, software, sales, the list goes on. It is somewhat scary how complex everything is, but it is amazing to build the thing with your own hands and see it gradually come to fruition. I am learning so many thins that I can’t learn from a book.
We are building this ourselves to learn by doing, as we don’t want to scale up without significant hands on experience.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#38I agree a lot with this author, but after being in software for a long time, it still feels like one of the unique problems of software is we keep changing the details. I imagine constructing stairs is largely the same as it was 50 years ago. Most web development pretty much does the same thing as it did 20 years ago, but almost all the details have changed. So as a programmer it gets frustrating having to learn all nearly completely new details but the outcome isn't really that substantially similar than it was when I first learned Java servlet dev.
TBH, I'm not arguing so much against this evolution of software (it seems like the over-complication of web dev has been discussed as nauseum on HN), but more that just from a personal perspective I have less patience for figuring out a new way to take stuff from a database and display it in a browser window.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#39I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.
Classic HN thread on the "we live in a simulation" idea:
Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested: http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-co...
61 points by ph0rque on Dec 11, 2012 | 64 comments
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#40This 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've found I need both myself. I learn best when I read something and then shortly after get practical practice using what I just read. I find i'll forget little details of what I read if I don't use it right away, but they'll stick if I do something with it right away.