Comment by Jugurtha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jugurtha | Hacker News Reader

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“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone."

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

Exactly this. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between vertebrae and ribs. Articulations.

The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be very careful near those things.

This part of the passage stuck out to me also. My read on it is that what enables the subject of the story to guide his knife so well is: human attention is a finite resource and it's typically divided up among many things, and, the more attention allocated to something the more rich its representation in consciousness.

If you have some variation in success watching your breath in meditation, you'll notice an astonishing range of detail that your breath might be represented with. When you are distracted, it might barely register as the symbol, "feeling of breath"; and if you have nothing else on your mind, you can have a super rich, fully continuous experience of it moving in and out, with all the gradations of temperature at different points etc.

Seems not very useful with breath watching, but if you carry this over to a sport or other skill, it's amazing how much more time it seems you have to act, and how many subtleties about the playing field that are otherwise totally filtered out.

I can imagine the butcher feeling every little difference in density of the meat as his knife moves along, anticipating where it will give or catch and always remaining on a smooth track.

I looked into cognitive skills on and off for some time. I started writing something to sythesize my knowledge about it and share it but I didn't as you can see (from the time management chapter, you see where the problem lies):

https://github.com/jhadjar/Notes/blob/master/Cognitive%20Ski...

From problem solving to deliberate practice, meta-cognition. etc. Long-term potentiation is one of the concepts that blew my mind the most. Following the process down to the neural and ion level (as in how sodium, calcium and magnesium ions are involved), I learned amazing things.

Here's a sweet Long-Term Potentiation video describing what happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vso9jgfpI_c

I recently put a few things in that repo and add to it from time to time instead of "wanting to do one big thing".

You'd probably be interested in reading Edward Slingerland's Trying Not to Try for a take on the parallels between wu wei and current research in cognitive science.

Thank you for the not asinine recommendation, sn9.

I do not mean this to be offensive, but of course bayonets are still sharp when their edges are not ground by use.

I love the story. There is much to learn; to me, it's about understanding where rather than how much.

But let's not forget it's a story. I'm sure some people are better or worse at butchering sheep, but a genericism does not add anything.

It's like if I say, "when you feel resistance, relax then work through it". It's meaningless. Not un-useful, not un-true, but definitely not "true" by the high standards of repeatable objective science.

"Not true but useful" is a phrase I frequently tell myself to improve my life without losing understanding of the spectrum of "true", and where I draw my line.

>I do not mean this to be offensive, but of course bayonets are still sharp when their edges are not ground by use.

It can't be offensive. I might have been unclear but we actively use one of them. The other is a French stabbing sword-bayonet unsuited for cutting.

>But let's not forget it's a story. I'm sure some people are better or worse at butchering sheep, but a genericism does not add anything.

I don't know where you're seeing a genericism because it's rather precise: you feel, as in tactile feeling, where there is a gap and you cut. I understand what you mean though by "not true but useful" and the practice of a "folk taxonomy" of sorts to create a new class called "useful but not true" to avoid polluting your "true" branch.

I remember I had detected a pattern that helped me in high school chemistry where I made up a rule based on the Carbon count. It held perfectly for the low carbon count stuff we were studying at the time but I knew it couldn't be generalized. I guess the scope of something, folk taxonomy, mnemonic devices, etc. are also examples of "useful but not true".

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