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Replying to
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.
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