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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

I am a person with a predominantly symbolic/linguistic way of thinking, and I'm aware that I tend to be bad at anything resembling graphic design, drawing, understanding of diagrams, etc... but this puts into perspective how much I really suck at that.

Out of the example figures in this post, some of them I would outright not know how to draw. Others I would be able to draw, but I think each of them would take me at least about an hour, maybe more. And this is not out of lack of familiarity with the tool: Inkscape is my go-to tool for vector drawing and what I use most for scientific paper figures, presentation slides, posters, lecture slides, etc. so I have lots of hours of practice with it.

Who is more of an outlier, the author or I? Is it really within the reach of most people to be able to whip up figures like that in a few minutes?

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The author strikes me as someone who is ridiculously talented. Look at most people's presentation slides - figures are generally terrible.

One thing that seems to be missing from these posts though is that this kind of uber-productivity with tools and shortcuts takes serious practice. Even ridiculously talented individuals still need to commit those shortcuts to memory such that they can recall them when needed.

This is so true. I've been using Inkscape for years and it took me a long time to get used to the keystrokes and tools it provides. I recently gave a git talk at work and ended up drawing many, many diagrams for it using Inkscape. Even though I was well-versed in the tool, it still took a long time. So, it's a combination of dedication in time to practice but also dedication in time to create the illustrations.

On top of that, there's the learning of aesthetics along the way: what colors to use, what proportions to use, how much margin to set for better-looking illustrations, and so on. This takes serious practice.

This is the thing that blocks me from, for example, emacs. I really want to use it, but I really don't want to spend a few weeks learning how to use it.

I'm uncertain whether it is the conceptual step of visualising the image, or the execution that you find challenging. From the context I'm assuming it's the former. I find drawing these types of images effortless.

But I ( native English speaker) struggle ( had to google to write the first sentence ) with which is which in _former_ and _later_. I always imagine the past stretching behind and the first thing mentioned is now further away from me, so it should be the 'later' and the second thing mentioned is now closer to me and should be the 'former'. I've had this conversation enough to know that some people agree and others respond by sharply downgrading their estimation of my intelligence. As a _predominantly symbolic/linguistic_ person I suspect former/later is something you would perceive as effortless.

Though I have hard time taking the visual/auditory/kinaesthetic learning styles seriously, and with no thought as to the contribution to the variation between individuals being learned or innate - symbolic/linguistic/visual seem to be different competencies.

And Gilles Castel seems near the top of the curve on all of them.

Yes, it's mainly the conceptual part that is problematic. Although when drawing Bézier curves, for example, I also have problems with the execution, but I think they are also due to lack of visual thinking (the relation between where I click/drag the mouse and the final curve is totally non-obvious to me).

Indeed, as you assume, "former" and "later" don't pose any problem for me because I don't imagine anything visual at all when I evoke those concepts, I just think about what they mean in a non-visual way. But I can see why you would struggle if you think visually.

I guess the analogous weakness in my case is the one that manifests when I have hung my coat and forgot to take out e.g. the keys. I know what pocket my keys are in (e.g. suppose they are in the left inner pocket) but I totally struggle to find it when I'm not wearing the coat. Visual thinking seems to really outperform symbolic thinking in that problem, and sometimes memorization of the solution provides a shortcut in similar issues, but there it doesn't work because the coat can be hung in two orientations! So it's usually faster for me to take the coat, put it on, take the keys, and then hang the coat again, and in fact that's exactly what I do, at least if no one outside of friends and family is looking... :)

I'm not sure about learning styles (if a teacher provided a visual schema of a lesson I just translated it to words, or focused more on the oral explanation and ignored the diagram, and still learned it fine, it wasn't such a big deal as some people make it look like), but thinking styles are definitely a thing. I'm not sure if the difference is learned or innate either. In my case, I have always loved reading and read a lot since infancy, so it might be learned.

The coat image is very amusing :)

By the way, it's "latter", not "later".

I always imagine the past stretching behind and the first thing mentioned is now further away from me, so it should be the 'later'

If the past is behind you, isn't further away earlier in time? The Romans are further back than yesterday, right? So nearer should be later in time?

I often have to stop when doing filesystem datetime comparisons, to work out if I want greater-than or less-than, and picture it as Unix Epoch in seconds, the later time is a greater number, nearer things are closer and bigger and more recent, distant things are smaller, farther and more ancient.

(btw, it's former/latter)

Who is more of an outlier, the author or I?

I'd say both.

Is it really within the reach of most people to be able to whip up figures like that in a few minutes?

I'd say no.

This is a question that goes directly to the core of my competence. In general we're living in a pioneers' era where demand trumps offer overwhelmingly.

The tools we have, we don't use them because they're the best possible tools, but because they're the only tools available.

We are in such a need of any tool that works somehow, that we're deceived to think that they're wonderful when they're just slightly better than the rest. The space for improvement is vast, including a tool that would make those diagrams easy for you.

He’s ridiculously skilled with the tool. It would take me an hour to draw most of those diagrams and I used the same basic method (no advanced tooling) for my thesis.

There’s no way I’d use it in a lecture.

I wonder how much time he's invested to getting to the point where he's this productive.

You are definitely not the outlier. As someone with a predominantly visual/spatial way of thinking, programming has been a really tough skill to develop because, like math, it's often taught in the symbolic/linguistic manner. Only very recently, since using illustrator to diagram ideas, I am finally making progress on my (not assigned) projects. This seems like such an easy thing to do for most others in this space, but since instruction hasn't offered me the most apt thought patterns to program, have had to come up with my own.

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