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This seems to be the engineer's version of a type of sentiment that has been expressed for hundreds, if not thousands of years: once you really understand a thi

This seems to be the engineer's version of a type of sentiment that has been expressed for hundreds, if not thousands of years: once you really understand a thing, it's not magical anymore. A great example of this is Mark Twain's writing on his experience with the Mississippi river before and after being a riverboat captain ("Two Ways of Seeing a River")[1]. [1] https://wordenenglishiv.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/5/23650430/two_ways_of_seeing_a_river.pdf https://wordenenglishiv.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/5/23650430/...

shorts_theory 7y ago
OP and writer here, thanks for sharing this. I enjoyed that piece and the sentiment really resonates with me.
tempguy9999 7y ago
Indeed. Eliza was created to kill the magic. The author, Joseph Weizenbaum said it precisely. 'It is said that to explain is to explain away. This maxim is nowhere so well fulfilled as in the area of computer programming, especially in what is called heuristic programming and artificial intelligence. For in those realms machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experience observer. But once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible. The observer says to himself, "I could have written that." With that thought he moves the program in question from the shelf marked "intelligent" to that reserved for curios, fit to be discussed only with people less enlightened than he.' The phrase "to explain is to explain away" is Shakespearean in its precision. But such regret at a loss of magic (or put another way, loss of ignorance) is IMO not a good sign, that a person wants to be somehow deceived, and I don't think that's healthy. Bit harsh perhaps but just my view.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Anyone with this problem should switch to physics, because it gets better as you learn more. I bet there are a lot of other things like that.
  - AndrewOMartin 7y ago
    Any excuse to post something from the BBC's Feynman Archive. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018w2zl https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018w2zl (1m26s) Richard Feynman recalls a disagreement with a friend, where he maintains that a scientist can appreciate the beauty of a flower just as much as an artist. Feynman believes the aesthetics of a flower can be recognised by everyone. He says that a scientist can also imagine the plant at a cellular level, and see the beauty in its complex inner structure. He wonders whether this beauty can also be appreciated by other creatures
- didibus 7y ago
  I also like the AI Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect It's the idea that "AI is anything that has not been done yet". Or as I like to say: "AI is any algorithm you haven't understood yet." So you can go: * "That's not AI, that's just a regex over a string!" * "That's not AI, that's just a lookup over a dictionary!" * "That's not AI, that's just a series of if statements!" * "That's not AI, that's just a search for keywords in text!" * "That's not AI, that's just an optimized brute force over a large search space!" * "That's not AI, that's just a linear regression!" * "That's not AI, that's just a neural network!" * "That's not AI, that's just Bayesian Statistics!"
  - z3phyr 7y ago
    AI effect also stems from naming your research "AI" which is pretty broad and it's meaning can change with context. Say for example, I go on a quest to create "AI" from scratch and start with inventing string interning to keep track of symbols. It would be pretty big deal for me, but it would absolutely not be AI which was an ill defined goal from the start. String interning though will be useful for a lot of disciplines, and a good marketing department will start calling it AI to get more moolah out of it. This is exactly what happened in the 80s and its practically what is happening today. "AI" is a great motivator to call any of your project a success, because it encompasses everything. Programming Languages, GUI, Networking and whatnot have come out of "AI" research. In my books, AI just mean one thing. A general purpose machine that can do anything that a human can or more. Not chess, not starcraft, not spying, but everything. People have started calling this hypothesis strong AI, but I think AI will do. This should be the final goal. Anything before that, Programming Languages, Deep Learning, Networking, Hardware Design should be called by their own names and merit.
    - Cybiote 7y ago
      I consider this argument flawed because it equates intelligence with human intelligence. The field is Artificial Intelligence, not Human Artificial Intelligence. A dog is intelligent, as is a pigeon. Even bees and some mollusks, like the cuttlefish, are intelligent. They can't think in all the ways a human can but at what they do, they are competent, even clever. I feel the same is true for machine intelligences. It takes intelligence to learn Go or Chess but it also takes intelligence to play, or at least this is what we say for humans. When the human is thinking about Starcraft, we consider only how good their thought patterns are for that game. We do not look at their vision, walking, social skills or whatever. The same should be applied for the Chess or Go AI while it is playing Chess or Go. While one can complain that all they know how to do is play Chess, anything else is unfair.
ljm 7y ago
I can’t find the quote but it reminds me of Jonathan Creek. Paraphrasing: magic, once explained, is much more banal than it really seems.
gavinpc 7y ago
Ha, that is always my go-to story for that idea. So far I've never met anyone who's heard it. Great autobiography.
01100011 7y ago
I disagree. I still love aspects of my job and will until the day I die. RF communication is still magic. The power of modern computers is absolutely amazing. Power efficiencies and transistor densities blow my mind. As a software engineer, I feel like I create something out of nothing. I am completely bored with version control, flaky automated testing systems, decaying source code, the "development process", not being empowered to do good work, etc. Things are fun when they're new. They're also fun when they don't require a lot of work. Small software is fun. Shoehorning features into a massive codebase or hunting for obscure bugs in a complex system is not always fun. Even when it is fun, it is draining.
- nneonneo 7y ago
  But that’s the point - you fully understand the domain of software engineering, so it’s not magic, so at least some of the fun has gone out of it. You might not fully understand how RF communication works, or how the transistors in a chip are put together. An engineer working on either domain might well be bored of their work too. Imagine working 8 hours a day using suboptimal tools to model and tweak the radiant field of an RF antenna, or carefully optimizing the hardware demodulators, or dealing with the intricacies of Doppler frequency drift as your antenna sways in the wind (or is carried by a fast-moving object). Or, imagine a chip engineer having to redesign the scheduling pipeline for the 15th time to fix some silly flaw in one instruction, or a lithography engineer struggling to improve yields in the face of relentless quantum physical effects. Once you understand these things at a low enough level, the magic really can drain away. But, of course, it’s useful to maintain a sense of collective achievement here - we’re where we are now because generations of scientists and engineers did the work to figure out the magic and how to harness it.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > you fully understand the domain of software engineering I'm not sure I can say this of anyone, although I won't deny that there are a few people that tend to do a lot better at this than most ;)
  - 01100011 7y ago
jdsully 7y ago
I never understood the need for things to be magic. Isn’t cool that you can predict and harness these great forces?
_0ffh 7y ago
"Newton has destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours." - John Keats

shorts_theory 7y ago

OP and writer here, thanks for sharing this. I enjoyed that piece and the sentiment really resonates with me.

tempguy9999 7y ago

Indeed. Eliza was created to kill the magic. The author, Joseph Weizenbaum said it precisely. 'It is said that to explain is to explain away. This maxim is nowhere so well fulfilled as in the area of computer programming, especially in what is called heuristic programming and artificial intelligence. For in those realms machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experience observer. But once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible. The observer says to himself, "I could have written that." With that thought he moves the program in question from the shelf marked "intelligent" to that reserved for curios, fit to be discussed only with people less enlightened than he.' The phrase "to explain is to explain away" is Shakespearean in its precision. But such regret at a loss of magic (or put another way, loss of ignorance) is IMO not a good sign, that a person wants to be somehow deceived, and I don't think that's healthy. Bit harsh perhaps but just my view.

whatshisface 7y ago
Anyone with this problem should switch to physics, because it gets better as you learn more. I bet there are a lot of other things like that.
- AndrewOMartin 7y ago
  Any excuse to post something from the BBC's Feynman Archive. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018w2zl https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018w2zl (1m26s) Richard Feynman recalls a disagreement with a friend, where he maintains that a scientist can appreciate the beauty of a flower just as much as an artist. Feynman believes the aesthetics of a flower can be recognised by everyone. He says that a scientist can also imagine the plant at a cellular level, and see the beauty in its complex inner structure. He wonders whether this beauty can also be appreciated by other creatures
didibus 7y ago
I also like the AI Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect It's the idea that "AI is anything that has not been done yet". Or as I like to say: "AI is any algorithm you haven't understood yet." So you can go: * "That's not AI, that's just a regex over a string!" * "That's not AI, that's just a lookup over a dictionary!" * "That's not AI, that's just a series of if statements!" * "That's not AI, that's just a search for keywords in text!" * "That's not AI, that's just an optimized brute force over a large search space!" * "That's not AI, that's just a linear regression!" * "That's not AI, that's just a neural network!" * "That's not AI, that's just Bayesian Statistics!"
- z3phyr 7y ago
  AI effect also stems from naming your research "AI" which is pretty broad and it's meaning can change with context. Say for example, I go on a quest to create "AI" from scratch and start with inventing string interning to keep track of symbols. It would be pretty big deal for me, but it would absolutely not be AI which was an ill defined goal from the start. String interning though will be useful for a lot of disciplines, and a good marketing department will start calling it AI to get more moolah out of it. This is exactly what happened in the 80s and its practically what is happening today. "AI" is a great motivator to call any of your project a success, because it encompasses everything. Programming Languages, GUI, Networking and whatnot have come out of "AI" research. In my books, AI just mean one thing. A general purpose machine that can do anything that a human can or more. Not chess, not starcraft, not spying, but everything. People have started calling this hypothesis strong AI, but I think AI will do. This should be the final goal. Anything before that, Programming Languages, Deep Learning, Networking, Hardware Design should be called by their own names and merit.
  - Cybiote 7y ago
    I consider this argument flawed because it equates intelligence with human intelligence. The field is Artificial Intelligence, not Human Artificial Intelligence. A dog is intelligent, as is a pigeon. Even bees and some mollusks, like the cuttlefish, are intelligent. They can't think in all the ways a human can but at what they do, they are competent, even clever. I feel the same is true for machine intelligences. It takes intelligence to learn Go or Chess but it also takes intelligence to play, or at least this is what we say for humans. When the human is thinking about Starcraft, we consider only how good their thought patterns are for that game. We do not look at their vision, walking, social skills or whatever. The same should be applied for the Chess or Go AI while it is playing Chess or Go. While one can complain that all they know how to do is play Chess, anything else is unfair.

ljm 7y ago

I can’t find the quote but it reminds me of Jonathan Creek. Paraphrasing: magic, once explained, is much more banal than it really seems.

gavinpc 7y ago

Ha, that is always my go-to story for that idea. So far I've never met anyone who's heard it. Great autobiography.

01100011 7y ago

I disagree. I still love aspects of my job and will until the day I die. RF communication is still magic. The power of modern computers is absolutely amazing. Power efficiencies and transistor densities blow my mind. As a software engineer, I feel like I create something out of nothing. I am completely bored with version control, flaky automated testing systems, decaying source code, the "development process", not being empowered to do good work, etc. Things are fun when they're new. They're also fun when they don't require a lot of work. Small software is fun. Shoehorning features into a massive codebase or hunting for obscure bugs in a complex system is not always fun. Even when it is fun, it is draining.

nneonneo 7y ago
But that’s the point - you fully understand the domain of software engineering, so it’s not magic, so at least some of the fun has gone out of it. You might not fully understand how RF communication works, or how the transistors in a chip are put together. An engineer working on either domain might well be bored of their work too. Imagine working 8 hours a day using suboptimal tools to model and tweak the radiant field of an RF antenna, or carefully optimizing the hardware demodulators, or dealing with the intricacies of Doppler frequency drift as your antenna sways in the wind (or is carried by a fast-moving object). Or, imagine a chip engineer having to redesign the scheduling pipeline for the 15th time to fix some silly flaw in one instruction, or a lithography engineer struggling to improve yields in the face of relentless quantum physical effects. Once you understand these things at a low enough level, the magic really can drain away. But, of course, it’s useful to maintain a sense of collective achievement here - we’re where we are now because generations of scientists and engineers did the work to figure out the magic and how to harness it.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > you fully understand the domain of software engineering I'm not sure I can say this of anyone, although I won't deny that there are a few people that tend to do a lot better at this than most ;)
- 01100011 7y ago

jdsully 7y ago

I never understood the need for things to be magic. Isn’t cool that you can predict and harness these great forces?

_0ffh 7y ago

"Newton has destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours." - John Keats