Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctvdev | Hacker News Reader

> That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse

we learn by doing

Put differently: you get good at what you actually do, not what you think you're doing.

If you're not coding anymore, but using AI tools, you're developing skills in using those AI tools, and your code abilities will atrophy unless exercised elsewhere.

I’ve also seen along those lines “there is no compression algorithm for experience” - a nice summary of the hn posts from today.

It seems overly pessimistic about education. Book learning isn't everything, but a physics textbook could be seen as the compression of centuries of experience.

Book learning to me seems like a compression of knowledge that had to be acquired through many years of experimentation and observation. But knowledge is not an experience itself.

Take juggling for example - something that was on HN homepage last week. You can learn everything you need to know about juggling though a post or a book or an educational video. But can you juggle after all that book learning? Not at all - to be able to juggle one has to spend time practicing and no amount of reading can help meaningfully compress that process.

Muscle memory required for juggling is not a 1:1 correlation to experience, but I feel like it's close enough to it.

Juggling is a nice example. Maybe one could phrase it as, you can learn how to learn to juggle from a book.

Nice analogy.

In many ways producing output of the brain is akin to juggling thoughts, ideas and concepts.

I don't know. Growing up and seeing life and people around me I firmly believe that if you have enough brain power and intuition for $TOPIC you can speed-run it. At the same time, with time and experience and doing/re-doing it, you will learn or master $TOPIC [1] even with less brain power.

[1] Depending on the topic and the level of knowledge of it.

1. Intuition mostly “muscle-memory” earned from previous experience.

2. Don’t assume you’re the next Mozart. Someone is, statistically it’s not you.

Maybe it's just muscle-memory, but clearly there are brains which develop it 100x faster than others, depending on the topic. See the aforementioned Mozart and the music topic. I think there are a lot of young and not so young adults whose peak performance in instrument playing is equal to Mozart's at age 8.

There are always exceptional cases that won’t apply to just about everyone else. Mozart did more than just play instruments.

Isn't intuition just distilled experience?

It can be but it can also be derived by raw brain power, IMO, and that's my point. You can understand how something work by simulating many mental models quickly in your mind, comparing them and deciding the one that makes more sense, or you can be overwhelmed by doing this and be unsuccessful at it. But with the years and experience you actually distill that understanding, and you are able to apply it to other similar topics as well.

There clearly is though. You don’t remember every detail of every moment that constitutes the experience.

... or by textbooks, Stack Overflow, senior engineers, code review. How many engineers today got their start by building Minecraft mods or even MySpace?

I do think that these pieces sometimes smuggle in a nostalgic picture of how engineers "really" learn which has only ever been partly true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com