I often approach technical topics with an "art and science of X" mindset. The "art" part is usually a way of seeing rather than doing. It's only after the science part becomes second nature that you can see artistically. If you want to learn to see nails, become a hammer.
Conversation
The science part of an art-and-science thing is often something that's a partial specification for automation: hard constraints and constants.
1
6
One of the things a technical education teaches you is to get confident enough in your capacity for technical comprehension that you don't get attached to any one technical concept. You have a general confidence in your ability to demystify 90% of technical things for yourself.
2
12
The result is, that you can see the problem itself rather than being blinded by the selection of arbitrary pieces of possible solutions that you happen to understand. This is a failure mode I see often when non STEMies try to process technical knowledge.
1
13
Say there's a dozen core concepts in a technical subject, like statistics. Let's say you have low technical aptitude in general, but it just so happens that you understand 3 things and are mystified by 9 things. Maybe you grok mean, standard deviation, and confidence interval
1
5
You will tend to over-apply these 3 concepts in seeing things through a statistics lens. You cannot "see" artistically through statistics, because you didn't internalize enough of the science. Instead of art-and-science-of-X, you're stuck at partial-science-of-X.
1
6
The error of assuming any STEMmie will magically know everything about any technical topic (trope of the Hollywood uber-geek) is the other side of it: projecting your own incompleteness of science-of-X into unreasonable mastery perceptions. That's not what STEM training does
1
9
STEM training is anxiety inoculation. An engineer too may only know 3 of the required dozen core concepts to grok a problem. The diff is, they typically won't obsessively grip what they know in order to think. They stay with fuzzy views rather than trusting distorted ones.
1
1
23
Most engineers I know are not intimidated by *any* technical area except for the ones that require truly esoteric math. But this does not mean they must suffer from either false confidence or fearful anchoring on what they know.
2
1
6
Instead, they have a sense of where they are incompetent, but don't identify with their incompetence. It's just an area where they haven't put in the time to get competent. This means, incompetence does not blind the artistic eye or get them into "partial science-of-X" stuckness.
Replying to
Instead, good techies tend to have a meta-awareness of where they have, and have not, earned an "artistic eye" level of mastery, and pick their battles within those artistry zones (unless it's a learning project, in which case it's required to wander into partial-science zones)
2
12
Personal note: I'm a mediocre techie at best, but I think I have a pretty strong sense of where I do and do not have a degree of "artistic" eye. Much of this is due to randomly reading through intro texts of a variety of other engineering disciplines while I was an undergrad.
1
8
For example, though I was a mechanical engineering major, I read through Tannenbaum's OS text in 1993 to demystify operating systems. I read some other beginner text on semiconductor manufacturing. And a lot of steel metallurgy by virtue of being a steel-town kid. To what end?
1
6
I certainly didn't attain even partial science mastery, let alone artistic mastery in those subjects. But I did demystify the subjects for myself. 90% of my technical demystification education has been self-imposed. Anti-anxiety meds basically. Only a few tech areas scare me now.
1
6
Going deeper to artistry in a few narrow areas completed the meta-education. I can now look at 90% of tech subject areas/challenge, not have a panic attack, read a few primers/101 level things, enough to hold up an art+science conversation with people at mastery level
1
2
Technology is a vast, fragmented and endlessly specialized landscape of human striving. There's basically no way for anyone to have mastery at anything beyond a narrow patch, and at most 1-2 abstraction levels up or down.
1
9
Our ENTIRE ability as a species to solve problems more complex than the artistic-mastery bandwidth of any one person rests on our ability to communicate past our little silo areas without constantly having anxiety attacks. The anxiety response management IS the uber-tech skill.
1
2
24
