Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I don't see much of a correlation between what you wrote and what you screencapped; distinguishing between symbol and symbolized doesn't imply that symbols are useful without a working understanding of what they reference, however thinly functional

(How? Also what I wrote was Feynman in the same bit // forgot to put quotes)

I don't care of it's Feynman, as stated it's not a reasonable claim. Maybe context would help.

Mentioned Feynman re correlation btw screen cap/quote. I do think he’s being a bit tongue&cheek, but also learning vague definitions is setting up buckets/organizing structure to contain knowledge “Knowing the names of things is useful if you want to talk to somebody else.”

"Energy makes the toy move" is just a restatement of the unsolved "x makes the toy move," and it's one that actually makes most people worse off: if they ask a friend "what is energy?" they'll get a less applicable answer than "what makes the toy move?"

“The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.” The understanding of *definition* of a a word works on the realm of communication btw people as well as the *borders* of a concept

Wierdly Feynman's has two different points - one is about invoking a word as the answer to a question rather than explaining a concept - the other is more subtly that energy doesn't work in the way the framing implies when you come to fill in the details later.

Latter point hints at the crux of the issue to me, which is whether it's a good idea to try to educate children by way of models so sparse they don't even stand up to good questions. The problem is that most *adults* never realize that these aren't even good simplifications