Fascinating discussion of the nebulosity of electronic components featuring @robamacl and @mattskala. You don’t have to understand anything about electronics to get the key points (I hope! I don’t understand anything about electronics…)
Starting here:https://twitter.com/robamacl/status/1263505028591095808 …
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This make-a-reasonable-guess and try it and see process is far more prevalent in engineering and especially scientific methods than STEM professors want to admit. So it is under-taught, under-studied, and poorly understood. You can only learn it by apprenticeship and experience.
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Enormous amount of professional STEM practice is tradition: things are done some way because they long have been. There’s usually some theoretical justification, but if you think for ten seconds you realize it can’t be right. https://twitter.com/mattskala/status/1263517792931844099 …pic.twitter.com/3Hgeu7y062
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In technical practice, as in social policy, retaining traditions is often wise (“Chesteron’s Fence”). And sometimes not. We’re seeing catastrophic consequences of retained obsolete traditions in both science and policy in the US covid debacle.https://twitter.com/mattskala/status/1263518727070334976 …
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Well, a critical variable is cost. If you throw beads onto a bunch of wires where they are probably not necessary, you can significantly increase the chance your product will work on the first try. But if you want "minimum viable bead," discovering it will take trial and error.
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This point feels similar to the issue in comp sci theory that it's often much easier to approximate the answer to a hard problem - even quite well, and with a guaranteed approximation factor - than to really get the exact answer.
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