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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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.

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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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

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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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 reply 1 retweet 26 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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.

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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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.

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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      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)

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    8. Greg Borenstein‏ @atduskgreg 10 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @vgr

      This sounds a lot like the ideals of a liberal arts education. Except there the goal is to spread this attitude over the full domain of human knowledge. I see a lot of STEMmies shed this epistemic modesty when they touch on arts and humanities topics.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @atduskgreg

      Heh, you're bothsidesing the two-cultures divide 😝

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    10. Greg Borenstein‏ @atduskgreg 10 Feb 2019
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      Well I’d say the traditional liberal arts pre-dates that divide. Both cultures have their roots in it. I think you’re emphasizing an element of STEM culture that is most similar to the pre-divide mother culture.

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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @atduskgreg

      That I can agree with. To me a good sociologist for example, is someone with a rich understanding of the historical context of specific societies they've studied, with lots of qualitative and quantitative raw info. Not somebody who zips through town in a day and starts theorizing

      1:59 PM - 10 Feb 2019
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        1. Greg Borenstein‏ @atduskgreg 10 Feb 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Completely agree. Something like “a liberal arts of technology” is basically what I’ve been pursuing most of my adult life.

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