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Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

I decided to make rotis every day for a month (am male of Indian origin who hadn't ever cooked breads), AND eat them. The first one was completely inedible. The 30th day's rotis were edible, but nothing like what women in my family make. But still, edible.

Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.

This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.

The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".

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Why didn't you just ask the women in your family what they did to make them? It shouldn't take 30 attempts to get a basic flatbread recipe to be edible. It's not like all the women in your family devised recipes on their own - they just watched other women make them and learned how to do it that way.

This is like asking why someone built a text editor as a hobby project when Microsoft Word exists. There is value in experimentation and play, in trying to understand things from first principles. It would often be faster to just ask others, but if everyone did that, we would miss out on a lot of innovation.

It's more like taking 50 attempts to design a scalable font format instead of looking up how TrueType works.

Yeah, I can't believe the TrueType people didn't just use METAFONT.

If you're looking at it solely from perspective of "value" in experimentation and play, then that value mostly comes from expert level understanding of the ingredients and the process. To not ask for guidance from people right near you who know far more than you just seems like egotism.

Who has a better chance of developing an innovative omelette dish? Thomas Keller, or someone who can't make scrambled eggs without setting off the smoke alarm?

The point is, experts can bootstrap you so you can progress quicker than you can on your own. This is why mentors exist, and is the basis of Bloom's 2 sigma study.

It really depends on what your goal is. Some people just like "play." For example, I am terrible at video games--when somebody tells me that they "beat" a game, this usually seems unfathomable to me. The last video game I finished was Riven, back when Riven was new. I still do play now and then. I play Skyrim poorly. I like walking around and discovering things in the Skyrim world. If my goal had been to beat the game in some way, then I would be going about it terribly. But that's not my goal. It does not have to be because egotism.

In my experience, dealing with flour is an art, not a science. You just have to do it over, and over, and over, until you internalize the parameters and can adjust to them on the fly. The look, the feel, the temperature, the smell, etc.

Yes, and experts can guide you with feedback far quicker than you can perform these experiments and adjust the parameters on your own. This is exactly why mentors and apprenticeships exist.

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