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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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Replying to @theartlav
Could never wrap my head around holography, it's a pre-demystification level for me still. Quantum computing is another one. Something about these subjects prevents the "aha" pop of getting the basic point.
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Replying to @vgr
Quantum computing... Imagine that you have an iPhone and you are only allowed to interact with it's screen. On it's CPU there is a "factorize integer" opcode. The OS knows nothing of it. How would you get to raw opcodes from the GUI? That's basically the problem with making a QC.
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You're not going to be able to demystify these things for me in a tweet. For me, demystification requires at least skimming a full text book and understanding a couple of beginning examples, but without diving into full homework/test level problems or projects.
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Replying to @vgr
Might be enough to get an "aha" pop... But yeah, i tend to need to implement at least a skeleton model of a thing to really get it.
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