What’s the most impressive thing you’re ignorant about?
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ok that’s damn impressive [if author hadn’t gotten a B in electronics lab at MIT knowing sod all about electronics]
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I literally did not know how magnets work until I was a postdoc in physics. Surprisingly few people who could/should know the answer to this question actually stop to think about it.
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I've always enjoyed this interview, but not because it teaches you why magnets work:https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8
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I think this says more (negatively) about me than him, but I've always felt like this was a Feynman cop-out.
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I want to believe that a sufficiently great teacher can make me understand anything in whatever terms I demand to understand it.
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I think it was a cop-out too, in a way. Had he let the interviewer ask 'how' instead of why, the answer would have been much more straight forward.
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I can't argue with your second statement, but I imagine it more difficult and time consuming for teachers to create good analogies when they've invested a lot of time building on established principals using domain jargon.
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A pioneer of a given domain, however? They could do it like you expect.
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All that stuff is basically magic. "There's a 'charge!' It attracts things!" "Where does it come from?" "I dunno, it just... does." Newtonian physics is the only real physics, and everything else is fake physics made up by wizards.
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All the potentials act the same! A charge attracts an opposite charge just like the bottom of a hill "attracts" stuff rolling from the top if the hill-a magnet sticks to the side of your fridge just like you stick to the ground. Gravity is exactly as weird as all the other stuff!
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Not entirely convinced I understand gravity either Although it seems easier Monistic fields vs dualistic fields
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gravity is very much correlations rather than explanatory
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When you're explaining stuff you always end until saying that inanimate things "want" things. Ball wants to drop, bond wants to form. It's all animism.
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oh man it’s sooooo hard to not do this
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That's because nothing is explained! (Unless you come to Jesus or w/e.) It's just, like, a bunch of things we observe that happen for no particular reason. And we hate that! Even atheists can't resist finding intentionality somewhere.
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Part of the problem is that we have big, slow minds and live big, slow lives and a lot of the important things are fast and/or small.
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nobody actually knows how those work
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I didn’t do well in electronics class and now I explain to inventors how their own inventions actually work, the whole field is a huge sham.
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