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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I've seen some backlash against 'magic' lately and it surprised me. 'Magic' doesn't need to be understood to be used.

I don't care how my car works, just that it gets me to work every day. If it breaks day, I have the choice of learning another craft (car repair) or paying someone that already knows it.

Likewise, if I find a bug in Ruby's base code, I can choose to learn enough about Ruby's code to fix it, or write a bug report and let someone else.

I'm not advocating ignorance, I'm saying it's a perfectly valid option given that we aren't immortal.

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But i do want to learn more about how my car works, theres very little technology at home that i haven't seen disassembled(washing machine, microwave oven, tv, pc, mp3 player, cell phone). I've at least skimmed over parts of the source of a lot of software i use daily(emacs, slime, sbcl, HN). Even though i barely understand the electronics in my tv, and even though I've barely scratched the surface of emacs, i still prefer a more hands-on approach to the things i use in my daily life. I've been like this since a very young age, apparently i didn't have any toys that weren't destroyed by my curiosity :) I had the impression that this was true for a lot of people on this site.

As mentioned in the posts abstractions are leaky. You can't drive a car without having a rough knowledge about how it works or how forces act upon your car but if you drive a hybrid you don't have to know how the engines interact nor do you need to know how energy is stored when you brake. If you are interested in that you take a look otherwise you accept that it just works.

Actually, all I need to know is the controls and the daily maintenance, like putting gas in it. All the rest can be left to a specialist. I don't have to care anything about why pushing 1 pedal makes it go forward and the other slows it down. Or how turning a wheel changes the direction. Or how various buttons activate various features.

They just do, and that's good enough.

(I'm not actually ignorant of these things, but it certainly wasn't necessary to learn them. I chose to. It hasn't really helped me much, except to satisfy my curiosity.)

Not only aren't we immortal - the stuff that you might want to learn is probably being produced at a rate that exceeds anyone's capacity for education and retention.

That's kind of my point - you need to accept the 'magic' you're given, at least for the time being.

I feel a bit uncomfortable leaving it at that though, I always want to know how things are working. But it's not essential.

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