Hacker News Reader

Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

"See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way."

--Richard P. Feynman

View on HN

This is how i feel about medical school texts. Full of names, which the common folk confuse with "knowledge".

Took the intro to biology course in college, and was excited. But the curriculum was mostly memorization. Phylum, order, family, etc. Even the cell structures, which I though would be amazing, were mostly memorization.

I felt (and still feel) the course was a tragedy, that I had an intro to biologists, not biology.

I think the same thing happens with mathematics education. Even though I took maths up to 2nd year university, I never really got what it was like until many years later when I watched all of Leonard Susskinds Stanford lectures in order on YouTube. It just gave him a way of thinking and talking about something far more interesting than the symbols themselves, and I got the sense that if I had been introduced to the majesty of the universe and then shown how English as a language was inadequate to describe it, that I might have been more motivated to learn the symbols.

I had the same experience with math and physics. High school / college was mostly rote memorization, and it wasn't until much later that I heard a perspective that showed me the shape of of the concepts. It's too late for me to dive into them now, because also in college I had a friend that showed me what computers are capable of, and I've been down that rabbithole ever since. It's a good argument for being a proactive mentor. You never know when it might click for someone.

I just took freshman bio at UW as a 47 year old (with a master's and a job). They mentioned 3 people's names, Mendel, the guy with the sex chromosomes and fruit flies (see barely even covered the name) and hardy Weinberg's formulas. The whole class was stats, hypothesis testing, critical thinking and understanding and math with those formulas. We had to memorize about 30 total terms like gene, allele, heterozygous, etc. It was all observation, use a model hypothesize why the model does or doesn't fit.

I took it because when I learned honors bio in highschool in 91 it was all memorization of plant parts. This was way way better.

Reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts :-) https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

So you were looking for a top-down approach and you got a bottom-up approach. I guess those biologists have enough intrinsic motivation not to care about such things.

See also James Somers’ essay I Should Have Loved Biology: https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/

…and Feynman’s criticism of rote memorization in education systems: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...

I think knowing the names of things is useful and gets unfairly maligned. It gives your mind a set of symbols with which it can make connections, which is how understanding forms. Rote memorisation of names is a precursor to understanding.

I agree - names have power. I think consistently giving something a name teaches your brain that it is worth paying attention to, and over time that can radically alter your conscious experience of it.

I think what is being pushed back against is that the idea that knowing the name of something is important knowledge by itself. As you say, it is a handle to knowledge - a node that you can connect to other nodes, a precursor to understanding.

This is not a straw man - people spend hours of study learning the Latin names for funny little blobs in the human body, and call it "learning anatomy", and feel a sense of achievement. And the sense of achievement is important! It's motivation for an important task. But they have learned nothing, until they go back and learn what each blob does. It is vital to keep reminding the student of this, to not let their sense of achievement fool them into thinking they have finished learning anatomy. They have only started.

At lest it lets you talk about things with people who also have the knowledge.

When my mum was in medical school (1950s) they still used Latin (teaching was otherwise in English). It wasn’t one of the languages she spoke, but she just memorized the tokens and then could go back home and work in a hospital because all the technical terms were the same.

I did learn Latin and so used to be amused by the names of things. Unfortunately she was quite busy and never shared my amusement. A shame as she otherwise had a good sense of humor.

well they do need to have names for things. you can't exactly do surgery on "the third muscle from the back".

Isn’t it mostly exactly that just in Latin?

I can't say, but with a standardised and agreed-upon definition of a word/phrase, there should be much fewer ambiguities than otherwise. It probably doesn't matter quite as much what that name is as long as everyone knows what it refers to.

It sure is. eg. A.C. ligament just means "front crossed tie".

But the names are just another complicated way of saying "the third muscle from the back".

Medical names for things are just Latin Buffy-speak anyway.

Naming something gives it shape and form.

No, you got it exactly backwards.

A thing has shape and form and so many other aspects just by the virtue of being.

Giving a name to it doesn’t change the thing in the slightest, and mostly tells about the namer, not the namee.

One of the most infuriating things today is large swathes of people getting this wrong like you, and then acting on their limited view.

> One of the most infuriating things today is large swathes of people getting this wrong like you, and then acting on their limited view.

Humility and you aren't closely acquainted huh? Also love how you launched off on this tangent without thinking it through too much.

> Giving a name to it doesn’t change the thing in the slightest

Where do you think the shape and form that I'm speaking of exist? I'm referring to our subjective experience of reality. Did you genuinely think I meant that we changed objective reality by classifying something in our minds?

An eclipse is the moon getting in front of the sun, but for some people, it was a jaguar eating the sun, and that was scary. That's the shape and form they gave an eclipse in their minds.

> Where do you think the shape and form that I'm speaking of exist? I'm referring to our subjective experience of reality.

Do you think people who never learned languages (eg. due to child abuse) have subjective experiences?

Yes. From my reading, they develop their own language anyway, which led to some rather horrific experimentation at times.

It makes sense to me, we're hardwired for language, it has been rather heavily selected for.

Well, in my country, a kiwi is called that because that's what the call of the most common species sounded like, ditto kea. And likely a fair few others.

So you have a rough idea what they sound like.

Waxeyes/silvereyes are called tauhou (stranger or "new arrival") which tells us something very interesting about them indeed - that they self-introduced across 2000km of windswept ocean.

Can know _some_ things from a name.

Like that Feynman likely just made those names up :D

You are correct that knowing the name of something can teach you (or help you remember) more than just the name. But if you didn't know that 'kiwi' is onomatopoeic, knowing the name wouldn't tell you what the bird's call sounds like.

Onomatopoeia also depends heavily on language and culture. In other words, knowing an onomatopoeic name for something only tells you what somebody thought it sounded like, at best.

A name is just a name, even if some are better than others.

If its not a typo, Feynman definitely made these names up. Halzenfugel looks like mock-german. I would have bought it if it were written Halzenvogel... But not with -fugel. Dutch, maybe? :-)

Flügel is wing, Halzen isn't a word, but Halsen is, but it's like jibing in a boat.

I have never heard of the word "Halsen" and I am german. And "fugel" is not Flügel.

Well, I guess we're both not really into sailing: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/halsen

But I agree, fugel is just a botched invention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com