“While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”
Much of the restricted depth of this nature is a consequence of deliberate obfuscation or neglect by the people who are involved in the doing, such as trade secrets, or simply choosing not to write about or share the actual things that impact their craft.
You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
How can you claim your knowledge of the field is actually deep, if you’ve never even done anything with it? Knowledge without application is nothing, imo.
True “depth” comes from the know-how acquired in digging through all the minutia nobody else though to document, on your way to producing a new creation nobody else thought to build.
While I think there's some truth to yours and some of the sibling comments here, I think a lot of the discourse around documentation is actually just motivated reasoning.
The trope that software projects are poorly documented is so pervasive as to be saying nothing at this point. Despite extremely useful and celebrated documentation projects (MDN and Python off the top of my head) that dramatically accelerate other peoples' learning and productivity.
But when the topic is raised, the response is always "But we don't have time for documentation".
And when that time is given it becomes "It will be useless or out of date soon anyway, just go read the code" (As if there is nothing between non-practical high-level docs and per-line code comments.)
And when forced it becomes "Fine, but it won't be any good" or "Other people won't read/benefit from it anyway".
And when it's done, often as little effort as possible is put into it.
All of which smell to me like cover stories for: "I just don't want to do it."
In the case of Python, I do think the approachability of the documentation slipped after they migrated to the 3.x site, and I think this is somewhat reflected in the search engine rankings.
Henry Heimlich used "the heimlich maneuver" for the first time when he was 96 (in 2016), 40 years after inventing it, in the "senior home" where he was staying. But according to you, having invented was nothing in the first 40 years, because he didn't actually use it, never mind that it was used by others and taught as a life saving technique.
You're just beathtakingly ignorant of how progress actually happens. It's like your understanding of the world comes exclusively from thinking about the world in abstract hypotheticals, rather than interacting with it, which is ironic coming from someone stating that only action matters.
You’re so caught up in insulting me, you never stopped to think of I’d consider inventing a novel medical technique an “application” of knowledge. I would.
If all he did was read books about things other people did, he certainly would not have invented that.
Your following attempt at armchair psychology is humorous, but not much beyond that I’m afraid. Don’t quit your dayjob.
Well I certainly hope your patients can find the help they need. But let’s drop the hominems and get to the point:
Do you have a real counter example? Someone that through reading the material of others alone, with no practical/“hands on” experience, was able to develop what you consider “deep” knowledge?
Ha, I had thought you were an LLM prompted to be a contrarian with a chip on their shoulder. This all but confirms it^. I bet you don’t even have the prior messages in your context window.
^Or at least something with approximately that level of intellectual capacity/honesty.
>You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
I'm so tired of (mostly boomers) talking about learning how to work on cars like it's easy. Sorry guys, but the companies who make those DIY repair manuals that you guys keep talking about using to learn wrenching don't seem to make stuff for any modern vehicles. Don't believe me? Go check out how pathetic their selection is right now: https://haynes.com/en-us/
It is nigh impossible for a non-car person to learn how to wrench without direct literal hand-holding from those who do.
It's also lead to the mechanic industry being FAMOUS for scamming grandmas, mothers, US soldiers, and other captive audiences. I think the only groups with a worse reputation are lawyers and car salespeople.
Nope, most of the stuff I want to do on my 2017 RX do NOT have videos on YouTube. Good luck changing the spark plugs yourself including with YouTube. The back 3 will be impossible
It's impossible to learn to work on modern cars without help, and the idea that things are similar enough from the old cars that it carries over to modern cars is simply not true for a whole lot of vehicles. You really do need videos for each and every vehicle.
Watch even experienced mechanics works on new cars. They tend to bumble around for awhile.
There isn’t a need to read anything beyond introductory materials to acquire depth, if your competent enough.
In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.
In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality.
There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight.
Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts.
I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.
I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts…
The original claim was not that geniuses and savants exist. They clearly do!
The original claim was that a genius should be able to easily and quickly attain mastery of any topic, given a grounding in the basics. Like, you give Mr. Super Genius IQ a book on quantum chemistry and the next day they’re putting things together so cleverly they are on the precipice of new discoveries.
Feynman actually did this a couple of times! But I think that just shows the “unreasonable usefulness” of mathematics, as well as his own spirit of curiosity. (And at least one time that we know of, he faked it by reading a colleague’s research before he presented it. Not to take credit, but just as a prank, so he could interrupt and predict every conclusion before the presenter finished.)
Ramanujan is particularly interesting because he repeatedly claimed that divinity gave him his results.
I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.
Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science.
He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose.
It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time.
This was his MO.
Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software…
My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time.
There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.
I don't buy it. Every supposed super genius I ever heard about in the end had a tactic to their work. Even the high iq people have to have an approach to harness the intelligence.
This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done.
FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.
Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories.
Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:
First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.
The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.
While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.
What you're describing as a "super-genuis" is just someone that thinks they know it all after reading some introductionary material. They don't know what they don't know so they think they're "done".
Take this how you will but in my mind most of them are intellectual yet idiots. Little empathy and no social awareness. They may be technically smarter than their peers but so what?
These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
there are people out there who are better than you in every single regard. dont be jealous, be happy that the world can be composed of people better than you dreamed
What a bold conclusion. I remind you that you don’t know anything about me. But perhaps your characterization is to protect the comfort you draw from your world views.
What kind of person thinks that the people whose “brilliance” led them to invent weapons of mass destruction are better than anyone that cannot solve technical problems as fast as they can? Do you apply the same reasoning for wealth also? I suppose might is right for you?
You might not see this — for whatever reason — but it is indisputable: history is filled with the types of “geniuses” who in their rush to the prestige of being first they leave in their wake destructive effects on humanity. I argue that when people say “these are 1 in a hundred million” that yeah, because most of the people with similar aptitudes would pause and consider the implications of their actions while you argue that they are gods amongst men that we are “lucky to have met”.
> I remind you that you don’t know anything about me.
Yet you are willing to cast ridiculous assertions about groups of people - stating as fact as though you are the canonical source of truth.
> But perhaps your characterization is to protect the comfort you draw from your world views.
Seems like you define projection.
See if you can find a way to get a colleague or two to tell you what they honestly think of you. I'm sure you will be surprised at how they judge you. The trouble is getting honest feedback - people say they want it but few people receive it well so over time most people learn not to give their opinions.
Do you think the world will be better off if, let’s say, all these powerful super geniuses dedicated 5% of their time to deeply consider questions like “should I be building this” or “should I be working for this corporation”? With the same enthusiasm and rigor that they dedicate to their craft.
If you don’t see how many of these types are so immersed in their craft that they are oblivious to their impact on the world then you really haven’t interacted with many high-functioning types. If you have I encourage you to try and discuss these types of things with them.
Have you ever seen the tv news or read the newspaper when they cover a topic related to what you do for a living? Or a specific event you were a part of organizing? They usually have interviews with the “experts” you’re talking about. How do you feel about their accuracy and experience?
I misread that for a second as "while breath comes from reading and talking and seeing, death comes from doing" which I thought would be a great line from a Zorro film, even if not that sensible.
I have the same issue. My full password is over 20 characters, but some websites restrict to less than that or don't accept the special character that I use.
I have the exact same issue, mine also being over 20 characters which used to be above the length limit on a Microsoft account used to be 16 characters, so glad they changed that
Has anyone had poor performance on mac? I notice that my fans tend to spin up quite frequently with normal browsing. I didn't really have this issue with chrome.
> The point of parallelization is to harness the full power of the CPU. If you don’t want that try reducing the content process limit near the bottom of general options.
It's not murdering battery because it's "harnessing the full power of the CPU", it's chomping through almost 1% battery a minute on Mac while doing virtually nothing.
Apparently "vibrance" is one of the culprits and switching to the light or dark themes can help a lot. But yes, it's destroying battery compared to Safari for me. Which is a shame, as it's already my default on Windows.
“While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”