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I think many toys make this mistake. They try to teach basic theoretical concepts that you’ll eventually learn with math/physics classes. Cute but redundant. But you get an illusion of learning stamp-collecting side that you can’t learn in a math/physics course, when you’re not.
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In a way all the maker stuff I’m playing with and posting about right now is an attempt to kinda set aside the math/physics foundations, and re-establish hands-on stuff on independent empirical/phenomenological “stamp collecting” foundations.
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The math/physics is still important, but as a cost of doing business. It’s an entry-level boundary condition that separates engineering from vocational technician skills.
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That divide btw is an interesting one. Somehow industrialization created a vocational layer mostly sealed off from engineering. Welders, machinists, electronics assembly people, plumbers,… a vast universe of technicians who can get away with very limited math/physics.
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Industrial vocations are partly descended from artisan trades, partly, artificial constructs like video games. You may intuit physics of wood if you do woodworking, but there’s no chance a minimum wage circuit assembler can intuit semiconductor physics with no textbooks.
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Yeah, good point. There is “infrastructure fluency” in a few key tools (like a soldering iron) but in general, fluency is neither a thing in engineering, nor particularly central. You *expect* work to feel awkward and non-fluent half the time.
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Replying to @vgr
you also have significant diminishing returns to mastery of the components. checking the docs while coding isn’t that costly. being deeply fluent won’t actually gain you that much. contrast music, where that kind of fluency is absolutely crucial
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Another good point. Advanced math starts to feel like extremely discriminating stamp collecting. Once you get past foundations and basic skills, all the action is in the “rare stamp” theorems that are *both* true and important in the ocean of unimportant trivial truths.
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Replying to @vgr
I suspect some parts of math are like this, and others not. I remember an undergrad prof characterizing graph theory as the "area in which it is possible to pose an unlimited number of unimportant but new theorems." This, he said, is why it was the topic used in summer schools.
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One of the reasons I didn’t get far in math is that though I was good at the raw skills like manipulating trigonometric identities or differentiation or Laplace transform mechanics, I never developed a “taste” for how to wield the important and charismatic theorems/equations.
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Replying to
Possibly. It would explain why I got good at the mechanical parts and up to 3d in intuition, but beyond that I felt like I was fumbling in the dark with formal rules. I don’t think I have a single 4d intuition.