- Finding good explanations is hard because The creation of a new explanation always starts with a problem and there are infinitely many problems one could think of.
- Finding good explanations is made harder still by the fact that we humans never perceive reality as is. We must form theories about the world and thus use abstractions. Creating good abstractions requires deep understanding of fundamentals. Bad abstractions are illusions.
- The ability to go deeper allows you to get familiar with the structure of a problem on a fundamental level.
- Additionally, we humans learn best form concrete examples and experiences.
- Andy Matuschak makes a similar point in his notes.
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In response to People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice, many suggest that they don’t want detailed recall. They do most of their reading “to get a general picture,” or “just to get a conceptual understanding.” That might sometimes be possible, but in many cases it’s not possible to really understand a concept without a firm grasp of the details on which it’s built. The intuitive argument: Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. Imagine meeting a person who told you they “had a broad conceptual understanding” of how to speak French, but it turned out they didn’t know the meaning of “bonjour”, “au revoir”, or “tres bien”. You’d think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious.”
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- Lacking knowledge of fundamentals and lacking confidence to aquire them leads to avoidance as described by Pirsig in ZAMM.
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I’m started and ready to go and there’s John pumping away on the kick starter. I smell gas like we’re next to a refinery and tell him so, thinking this is enough to let him know his engine’s flooded.
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‘Yeah, I smell it too,’ he says and keeps on pumping. And he pumps and pumps and jumps and pumps and I don’t know what more to say. Finally, he’s really winded and sweat’s running down all over his face and he can’t pump anymore, and so I suggest taking out the plugs to dry them off and air out the cylinders while we go back for another beer.
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Oh my God no! He doesn’t want to get into all that stuff.
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All what stuff?
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’‘Oh, getting out the tools and all that stuff. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t start. […]”
- And later
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He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that’s not there.
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It occurred to me that maybe I was the odd one on the subject, but that was disposed of too. Most touring cyclists know how to keep their machines tuned. Car owners usually won’t touch the engine, but every town of any size at all has a garage with expensive lifts, special tools and diagnostic equipment that the average owner can’t afford. And a car engine is more complex and inaccessible than a cycle engine so there’s more sense to this. But for John’s cycle, a BMW R60, I’ll bet there’s not a mechanic between here and Salt Lake City. If his points or plugs burn out, he’s done for. I know he doesn’t have a set of spare points with him. He doesn’t know what points are. If it quits on him in western South Dakota or Montana I don’t know what he’s going to do. Sell it to the Indians maybe. Right now I know what he’s doing. He’s carefully avoiding giving any thought whatsoever to the subject. The BMW is famous for not giving mechanical problems on the road and that’s what he’s counting on.
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I might have thought this was just a peculiar attitude of theirs about motorcycles but discovered later that it extended to other things … Waiting for them to get going one morning in their kitchen I noticed the sink faucet was dripping and remembered that it was dripping the last time I was there before and that in fact it had been dripping as long as I could remember. I commented on it and John said he had tried to fix it with a new faucet washer but it hadn’t worked. That was all he said. The presumption left was that that was the end of the matter. If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet.
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- Still later:
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It’s not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It’s all of technology they can’t take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place and I knew that was it. Sylvia’s irritation at a friend who thought computer programming was ‘creative.’ All their drawings and paintings and photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she’s not going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. Of course John signs off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is obvious he is suffering for it. That’s technology. And sure, of course, obviously. It’s so simple when you see it. To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts both of them, tremendously. That’s why the conversation always breaks and freezes when the subject comes up.
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