Hacker News Reader

Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

As a curious software engineer, I have a basic familiarity on where heating oil comes from (I remember my first sci-pop book with a section on basics of oil processing), where nuts are grown, basics of food industry supply chains, and every other example covered. My knowledge might be rudimentary and without much detail, but I try to cover all bases, and when I discover some area of human knowledge I genuinely know nothing about, I jump to Wikipedia in excitement. (I read Wikipedia a lot).

I thought that being uncomfortable with own ignorance is a fundamental part of human nature. But apparently it isn't.

View on HN

You should try building a toaster from scratch

https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toas...

Unfortunately, I am not that good at manually building hardware. Learning how it works is another thing, though.

Be careful assuming you understand how something works without having built at least a prototype.

Interesting thought. Do not say you know it/understand it untill you experience it. I thing there a thin line between these two categories, those things we ca understand without experience, and the rest. Is there a research paper about this aspect?

The main issue is simply that most descriptions of a subject are nowhere near detailed enough to be "complete", and even if they are, the reader of that description almost never will manage to pick up every nuance of what is described.

Try reproducing results from some research papers, and you see this demonstrated very easily, both in frustration of having to figure out what you misunderstood, and in frustration of trying to figure out details that were left out.

This is correct. Got burned by this quite a few times.

He said his knowledge "might be rudimentary and without much detail" - it is perfectly possible to understand how something works (in a general sense), without building a prototype yourself.

Yeah, I thought that was all kind of funny too. I'm a voracious reader, and have been curious about just about all parts of science and technology at some point. So I too knew at least the basics for everything he mentioned. Magically plop me in a stone-age agrarian society, and we'd be back to at least an 18th-century level of technology in a couple decades.

There were some science fiction stories (I forgot their names and authors) in which time travelers actually encounter a lot of practical difficulties in past societies, because the people they encounter don't believe them or don't readily see the benefits of their suggestions. So maybe you need to add "a stone-age agrarian society that's eager to take advantage of my knowledge", since that part can't necessarily be taken for granted. :-)

Yup. And you need a common language, so that may take a while.

Some simple stuff like crop rotation, composing, irrigation (if needed in that climate), should be some easy wins though.

And then it would be on to making iron, glass and other basic building materials.

It is more likely that I'd just die of something stupid though, like bears.

This. I just saw a documentary about famous inventions yesterday. They talked about how when Alexander Graham Bell conceptualized the telephone, most investors said "Why should we ever need this? We can already transmit speech with telegraphs."

I guess the same effect amplifies the more absurd or outlandish the proposed technology appears.

> Magically plop me in a stone-age agrarian society, and we'd be back to at least an 18th-century level of technology in a couple decades.

Execution is key! That you know how it works does not mean you can successfuly build it!

This is a road to madness. If every time you wouldn't understand something you would just plunge into the material and get familiarized you would do nothing else for the rest of your life. I think Eno means managing ignorance in the way of making a decision on when to stay ignorant (whilst being aware of your ignorance) and when to learn and hence "fix" this ignorance.

> This is a road to madness

How so?

> If every time you wouldn't understand something you would just plunge into the material and get familiarized you would do nothing else for the rest of your life

That's how I've been spending a significant part of my out-of-work time, for most of my adult life. Is there anything wrong with being a curiosity-driven person?

Not at all, some might call that a 'hobby'.

There's no way you could actually do this. Going an hour on a normal day you'd have a life time of material to learn so I agree yes it is madness. You can't learn thousands of years of engineering, math, science, etc.

Many lifetimes. It is of course impossible to absorb the sum of all humanity's knowledge. But it is possible to have a 30000 feet view of it (or perhaps a shitty satellite view obscured by clouds). And I would feel very uncomfortable if I didn't have at least a basic knowledge on how my environment works.

Of course you can't learn everything, but you can keep your curiosity alive and keep questioning reality, and search for explanations. To me, it's not about learning the whole corpus of human knowledge.

Keyword is "basic", I think.

Curiosity in general is probably a fundamental part of human nature.

But you have to make a call at what point you stop trying to understand everything about everything. Thomas Young, the early 19th Century scientist has been famously described as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" - the sum of human knowledge moves on so vastly that it is simply physically impossible to have an in-depth knowledge of every possible subject.

I don't think he's saying that he knows absolutely nothing about these subject (I'm sure he's probably got a rough idea that the oil probably came in a big oil tanker for example).

But there's over 5 billion articles on Wikipedia, and at some point you've got to decide that you haven't got time to understand how the Four Hu (to take the first random topic I found) came about because you're spending time thinking about how AI works or whatever.

Of course, but there is (loosely defined) hierarchy of knowledge.

I haven't read (until now;)) the article about Four Hu (a specific topic), but I did read on 214 Kangxi radicals (more general/beginner friendly topic), and, of course, on Mandarin and Cantonese in general (I can't speak neither).

This is how it works. Curiosity is insatiable.

There is such a thing as "rational ignorance". It's all about the cost benefit analysis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com