6 ms·

I'd peg it at over 90%, depending on how your define terms. One of the difficult parts of being a teenager and young adult is that you learn the rhythm and gis

I'd peg it at over 90%, depending on how your define terms. One of the difficult parts of being a teenager and young adult is that you learn the rhythm and gist of how things operate without actually learning how they operate. This is one of the reasons "being cool" is such a big deal at that age -- the idea is to learn to mimic and fit in with the rest of how society works, not actually to be able to manipulate it. Faking it is much more important than actually doing it. That's what everybody else is doing anyway. Somewhere in your 30s or 40s (perhaps sooner or later) you realize that much of life is like that: you don't really understand how a car works, only that most of the time you can get in it and go places. When it doesn't work, you take it to another person. She may also not understand what's wrong. But most all of the time she does. If she doesn't, she takes it to another person, and so on. You keep getting closer and closer to total understanding but you never reach 100%. That same pattern applies to medicine, advanced physics, and most everything else. When there's a billion areas of knowledge, even 99% knowledge leaves a helluva lot of holes. There's this surface layer of generalities and half-truths that work so often that it's just not worth diving down into the details on everything else. On top of that, other people are very happy to share their own generalizations and heuristics, so we're kind of operating in a rumor-of-a-rumor mode. The vast majority of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes, like when you ask questions about how startups work and most of your surrounding culture gives you bad answers, it does. Most of life isn't a geometric proof built on the linear progress of science; it's a bunch of heuristics strewn together to make something practical that you can use. What we "know" is a product of generalizations and communications about half-truths from the environment we're in. This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know, especially in areas that make a big difference to you personally. It also means that you must accept a deep and abiding peacefulness in not knowing very much at all about most of the stuff you actually work with in your day-to-day life.

NeilRShah 14y ago
This was a fantastic insight. Thanks for writing.
Jun8 14y ago
This is a great point. Another good example is the "linguistic division of labor", put forth by Putnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam) wherein it is proposed that language can function (i.e. words have meaning) because people assume there's a person (or people) that can fix the meaning of a certain term. An example: When it was announced in 2011 that researchers have found that the electron was (nearly) a perfect sphere, I had no idea what "perfect sphere" meant in this context, so I appealed to the experts on on PE (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-the-electron-is-a-near-perfect-sphere http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-i...).
icelancer 14y ago
> This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know... Especially the stuff you really think you know. And the ease of doing so is inversely correlated with the amount of stuff you think you know about topic X.
nnq 14y ago
> you must accept a deep and abiding peacefulness in not knowing very much at all about most of the stuff you actually work with in your day-to-day life That's how 90% percent of the people think (the ones I only care about using and manipulating to achieve my purposes - not necessarily egotistical purposes, mind it, I might actually ask charity donation from them), but not how I and the 10% I care to hang around with do. For example, you don't kneed to know the details of how a car works, but knowing what an internal combustion engine is and that most breaks work by rubbing two things together and basic stuff like this is what everyone should know - my grandma knows this and she can reason heuristically about this even if she has never been to school and can't read or write. Same about computers - if you are an IT manager or even a sales or marketing guy in something computer related, if, for example, you don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted code and what this has to do with portability and, in consequence, cost of multi-platform development, then you're a mindless tool (probably a bad "tool") and I'll have no respect for you and your rights. You can't separate how it works type of knowledge from how to use it one, no matter how good the abstractions and UIs are. If it's something you're working with, then you should know the principles of how it works!
- jl6 14y ago
  I work with the English language every day, and so I have no respect for the rights of people who can't even spell the word "need" correctly. Is that what you're saying? :-)
  - nnq 14y ago
    Instead of comments attacking a geek elitist worldview, I get folks pissed off 'cause I mistyped "breaks" and "kneed" :) ...and I actually find it amusing after almost a dozen whiskey eggnogs ...funny times the holidays :)
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  most breaks work by rubbing... At this point, forget, how the pads operate, I'd be happy if people just knew how to spell "brakes"... I'm not picking on you in particular- I swear it is one of the most frequently misspelled words I read online.
sliverstorm 14y ago
There's this surface layer of generalities and half-truths that work so often that it's just not worth diving down into the details on everything else [...] This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know I don't understand how you got from point A to point B. Where did you actually show that it's critical to be unsatisfied with the system that is worth 99% of the time?
dschiptsov 14y ago
yeah, rumors, urban legends, folklore, oversimplifications, generalizations, even memes, instead of understanding or even knowing. This is due to cheap, low quality media, which broadcast and publish any crap imaginable. Pseudo-psychology, pseudo-medicine, pseudo-economics, pseudo-sociology, pseudo-everything. Just memes made out of other memes. "Sugar is bad, eat fiber". "Paper money is bad, buy gold". "Apple will expand infinitely, buy stocks". "Java is the platform of choice", you name it. And everyone is ready to approve or argue, to express an opinion, based on his own internalized memes. Uncontrolled consumption of lowest quality media leads to losing ability to see the world as it is, not as some talking heads around describe it. And all those few standard responses, ready to be displayed whether appropriate or not - not this, then it must be that. lol wut?
boboblong 14y ago
>You don't really understand how a car works, only that most of the time you can get in it and go places. When it doesn't work, you take it to another person. She may also not understand what's wrong. Oh, please! "She"? Let's all ruin the flow of our prose in an attempt at social engineering that probably isn't even worthwhile, shall we? I suppose you didn't bat an eyelash at Denzel Washington as savant pilot Whip Whitaker either.
- nodata 14y ago
  I didn't even notice this, perhaps that says something.
  - merlincorey 14y ago
    It jarred me... and not because the concept of female mechanics is strange to me (it is not any more strange to me than the concept of female programmers or female gamers) but because it really felt forced and I looked and the commenter had a male-sounding name making me feel like it was forced.
- kami8845 14y ago
  I don't even understand the purpose of it. What percentage of car mechanics is female? Less than 5%? Now I'm thinking about whether any given car mechanic is most likely to be male or female and am completely distracted from the point she is trying to make.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    Sounds like a personal problem. I didn't even notice.
    - kami8845 14y ago
      Yes. It's a personal problem. I made that evident by writing from the 1st person as evidenced by the usage of the word "I". And it clearly didn't affect only me as evidenced by the upvotes on my comment as well as the one one level above mine.
mkr-hn 14y ago
I love how this spawned a tree with someone demonstrating your point.
javajosh 14y ago
This is a remarkable comment, but within it lurks a subtle assertion that deserves to be explicit: 'knowing' is itself somehow important in and of itself. I'm growing increasingly convinced that this is wrong. Knowledge has value, but it is a strictly secondary value. It's value comes from the things that depend on it. For example, if you're an artisan and/or business person, then your primary driving force is "make stuff people want to buy". In that case, knowledge is indeed very useful for improving your outcomes (from how to build things to what people want to how to how to reach people, etc). If you are a scientist then knowledge is a critical component to building new knowledge--and subsequently defending it. Even that most basic satisfaction, the satisfaction of curiosity, is only a pleasant, transient jolt. (And that pleasure is, alas, so disconnected from the real world that even false knowledge is sufficient to trigger it, much to the chagrin of the habitually skeptical.) So yes, I think your model is fundamentally correct, that knowledge is an extraordinarily practical thing, designed primarily to know it's limits and find a specialist when that limit is reached. But you missed the outer context that gives meaning to this conversation - the fact that knowledge is merely the handmaiden to another driving force, and a handmaiden only need be "good enough" to reach a minimum acceptable thresh-hold.

NeilRShah 14y ago

This was a fantastic insight. Thanks for writing.

Jun8 14y ago

This is a great point. Another good example is the "linguistic division of labor", put forth by Putnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam) wherein it is proposed that language can function (i.e. words have meaning) because people assume there's a person (or people) that can fix the meaning of a certain term. An example: When it was announced in 2011 that researchers have found that the electron was (nearly) a perfect sphere, I had no idea what "perfect sphere" meant in this context, so I appealed to the experts on on PE (http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-the-electron-is-a-near-perfect-sphere http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10433/what-does-i...).

icelancer 14y ago

> This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know... Especially the stuff you really think you know. And the ease of doing so is inversely correlated with the amount of stuff you think you know about topic X.

nnq 14y ago

> you must accept a deep and abiding peacefulness in not knowing very much at all about most of the stuff you actually work with in your day-to-day life That's how 90% percent of the people think (the ones I only care about using and manipulating to achieve my purposes - not necessarily egotistical purposes, mind it, I might actually ask charity donation from them), but not how I and the 10% I care to hang around with do. For example, you don't kneed to know the details of how a car works, but knowing what an internal combustion engine is and that most breaks work by rubbing two things together and basic stuff like this is what everyone should know - my grandma knows this and she can reason heuristically about this even if she has never been to school and can't read or write. Same about computers - if you are an IT manager or even a sales or marketing guy in something computer related, if, for example, you don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted code and what this has to do with portability and, in consequence, cost of multi-platform development, then you're a mindless tool (probably a bad "tool") and I'll have no respect for you and your rights. You can't separate how it works type of knowledge from how to use it one, no matter how good the abstractions and UIs are. If it's something you're working with, then you should know the principles of how it works!

jl6 14y ago
I work with the English language every day, and so I have no respect for the rights of people who can't even spell the word "need" correctly. Is that what you're saying? :-)
- nnq 14y ago
  Instead of comments attacking a geek elitist worldview, I get folks pissed off 'cause I mistyped "breaks" and "kneed" :) ...and I actually find it amusing after almost a dozen whiskey eggnogs ...funny times the holidays :)
sliverstorm 14y ago
most breaks work by rubbing... At this point, forget, how the pads operate, I'd be happy if people just knew how to spell "brakes"... I'm not picking on you in particular- I swear it is one of the most frequently misspelled words I read online.

sliverstorm 14y ago

There's this surface layer of generalities and half-truths that work so often that it's just not worth diving down into the details on everything else [...] This is one reason why it's so critical to spend a lot of time challenging the things you think you know I don't understand how you got from point A to point B. Where did you actually show that it's critical to be unsatisfied with the system that is worth 99% of the time?

dschiptsov 14y ago

yeah, rumors, urban legends, folklore, oversimplifications, generalizations, even memes, instead of understanding or even knowing. This is due to cheap, low quality media, which broadcast and publish any crap imaginable. Pseudo-psychology, pseudo-medicine, pseudo-economics, pseudo-sociology, pseudo-everything. Just memes made out of other memes. "Sugar is bad, eat fiber". "Paper money is bad, buy gold". "Apple will expand infinitely, buy stocks". "Java is the platform of choice", you name it. And everyone is ready to approve or argue, to express an opinion, based on his own internalized memes. Uncontrolled consumption of lowest quality media leads to losing ability to see the world as it is, not as some talking heads around describe it. And all those few standard responses, ready to be displayed whether appropriate or not - not this, then it must be that. lol wut?

boboblong 14y ago

>You don't really understand how a car works, only that most of the time you can get in it and go places. When it doesn't work, you take it to another person. She may also not understand what's wrong. Oh, please! "She"? Let's all ruin the flow of our prose in an attempt at social engineering that probably isn't even worthwhile, shall we? I suppose you didn't bat an eyelash at Denzel Washington as savant pilot Whip Whitaker either.

nodata 14y ago
I didn't even notice this, perhaps that says something.
- merlincorey 14y ago
  It jarred me... and not because the concept of female mechanics is strange to me (it is not any more strange to me than the concept of female programmers or female gamers) but because it really felt forced and I looked and the commenter had a male-sounding name making me feel like it was forced.
kami8845 14y ago
I don't even understand the purpose of it. What percentage of car mechanics is female? Less than 5%? Now I'm thinking about whether any given car mechanic is most likely to be male or female and am completely distracted from the point she is trying to make.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  Sounds like a personal problem. I didn't even notice.
  - kami8845 14y ago
    Yes. It's a personal problem. I made that evident by writing from the 1st person as evidenced by the usage of the word "I". And it clearly didn't affect only me as evidenced by the upvotes on my comment as well as the one one level above mine.

mkr-hn 14y ago

I love how this spawned a tree with someone demonstrating your point.

javajosh 14y ago

This is a remarkable comment, but within it lurks a subtle assertion that deserves to be explicit: 'knowing' is itself somehow important in and of itself. I'm growing increasingly convinced that this is wrong. Knowledge has value, but it is a strictly secondary value. It's value comes from the things that depend on it. For example, if you're an artisan and/or business person, then your primary driving force is "make stuff people want to buy". In that case, knowledge is indeed very useful for improving your outcomes (from how to build things to what people want to how to how to reach people, etc). If you are a scientist then knowledge is a critical component to building new knowledge--and subsequently defending it. Even that most basic satisfaction, the satisfaction of curiosity, is only a pleasant, transient jolt. (And that pleasure is, alas, so disconnected from the real world that even false knowledge is sufficient to trigger it, much to the chagrin of the habitually skeptical.) So yes, I think your model is fundamentally correct, that knowledge is an extraordinarily practical thing, designed primarily to know it's limits and find a specialist when that limit is reached. But you missed the outer context that gives meaning to this conversation - the fact that knowledge is merely the handmaiden to another driving force, and a handmaiden only need be "good enough" to reach a minimum acceptable thresh-hold.