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Comment by JackMorgan | Hacker News Reader

More like I'm faced with realities when other people see magic. When the WiFi signal is spotty, the reality of the situation forces me to understand at least the basics of how it works and how the signal is getting blocked. When my database is acting slow, I can't just say "well the moon is half so..." I have to instrument and figure out what's happening and fix it. That at least pulls away a lot of the mystery.

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When you're responsible for something you have to understand it better (or at least get good at making justifications). All people do this, they just typically aren't responsible for keeping an object or program working.

I don't see why you would have a superior mental model about subjects you are not intimately familiar with the details of.

I don't recall making the claim of having a superior mental model. I make the claim that STEM workers cannot rely solely on mystical thinking, we have to apply the scientific method to perform our jobs. This gives us a tool at our disposal to pull back the mysteries in other areas of our lives. Flaky toasters, keyboard keys that stop working, the way light effects our bedtime routines. We don't need to rely on confirmation bias, we can apply the scientific method. Of course anyone can, but we're often forced to do it for hours a day, so we get a lot of practice disregarding our natural instincts in favor of observation and record keeping.

Hmm, well you effectively said you "see the world as it is" and that would typically be understood to be a claim that you have a superior mental model, I think.

>I can't just say "well the moon is half so..."

With a good BOFH excuse generator you could. https://bofh.d00t.org/

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