Learning is slow
When I was a kid, I used to think that I could learn anything right away. I remember, when I was 12 years old, thinking that I could invent anti-gravity just by thinking about it—never mind that I didn’t know bupkes about physics or whatever rediculous knowledge you’d need to invent such a thing.
I used to keep a copy of David Macauley’s The New Way Things Work by my bed and read from it every night before I went to sleep. (A collection of Bradbury stories from R is for Rocket and Golden Apples of the Sun was another regular bed-time book, but that’s for another time.) What made this edition “new” were the chapters on computers, inkjet printers, and so on. For those of you know don’t know his work, David Macauley is a great illustrator. His other books include City, about the planning, founding, and construction of a Roman city, and Castle, which is the same for a medieval castle. There’s also one on city sewers called Underground.
Macauley’s illustrations were mostly black-and-white ink, with cross hatching and cutaways. His work is right between the sterile precision of a blueprint and the softness of a children’s book. Somehow, he makes sewage systems seem like an engineering marvel rather than a repository of human waste.
His great work of fiction is called Motel of the Mysteries; it parodies the then-recent discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. In it, future anthropologists discover what they believe to be a tomb of lost kings, complete with bedchamber, temple, and countless precious objects sealed in with the the dead for eternity. The reader knows that the anthropologists have discovered a motel from our time, buried and forgotten.
The anthropologists believe that the bathroom is some sort of temple and the things in it religious accessories. With great pain they reconstruct the ritual of the place, and in a climactic moment re-enact it: the head anthropologist is dressed as they supposed an ancient priest must have dressed, with toothbrush earings and toilet paper headwrap. They have finally decrypted the mysterious seal of the sacred porcelain vessel, and Macauley shows us the great anthropologist, to the delight of on-looking journalists, crying this somber religious formula into the newly unsealed toilet: “sanitized for your protection!”.
The Way Things Work is a less speculative, but also less literal work: it is a compendium of, well, how things work, illustrated (in color this time) by a colorful cast of characters: stone-age people and mammoths. The section on simple machines, for example, shows our little friends hoisting a very confused mammoth up a cliff using a pully; they text explains, with more abstract diagrams, how the people used the machine to exert more force on the mammoth, at the extent of having to pull the rope farther. The section on boyancy shows a series of mammoths trying and failing to ride a raft across the river: they have to put sides on the raft, since the weight of the mammoth displaces the water underneath the raft. Without sides, the raft is swamped and the mammoth gets soaked; with sides, the boyancy of the raft is eventually sufficient to carry the mammoth, dry, across the water. Ok, maybe my memory of the physics involved is a little spotty, but this is the sort of thing that I learned about. There were also sections on airplanes, cars, windmills, computers and inkjet printers—these last are what made my edition “new”.
I used to have great fun with these books, because they explained in just the right amount of detail for a ten-year-old what was going on. They weren’t infantalized, but they weren’t dry, either. They abstracted properly: they got rid of the accidental to reveal the essential; they removed unhelpful detail and left what I needed in order to make sense of what was happening. It was this sort of presentation that convinced me that I could figure anything out, sooner rather than later: if I could understand how a pully or boat or engine worked, why not anti-gravity or faster-than-light travel?
At the time, though, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I thought, “surely I can figure this out—how complicated can it be?” It turns out—very complicated. On the one hand, it is important to be able to abstract away the unnecessary in order to understand what’s happening: if you don’t know what you’re doing, how will you be able to do it? On the other hand, in order to really do the thing, in order to build the car or implement the program or whatever, you have to have a full mastery of the details all the way down. You can’t cut corners on your pully, or the mammoth will fall: knowing that a pully allows you to trade length of cable for force exerted is one thing, but building a block and tackle that’ll let you lift a mammoth is another thing all together. The latter requires the former, but the former doesn’t automatically enable the latter.
I fell in this divide as a kid: I understood (vaguely) the problem, but I had no idea of all the details that went into its solution. And these details are, in some sense, the whole truth. When you abstract away the “accidental” to reveal the “essential”, you’re sorting through the details and saying “this one is helpful right now” and “this one isn’t”. But ultimately, the difference is in presentation, not in the being of the thing: all the details are necessary.
At this point I have to stop, because we’ve fallen into a subject of great importance to me that I don’t want to screw up. Allow me to collapse, as is my wont, into citation: Flatline Materialism by Mark Fisher and Dijkstra’s comment that “programming is the ability to navigate levels of abstraction”. If you’ll give me another couple decades of research and thought, I’ll explain what the hell I’m talking about.
For now, let me say this: there’s no skipping steps in computation. You gotta go through the actual material process of computing to get the result; it doesn’t appear by magic. And, more astonishingly, you don’t know in advance what the result is going to be: you just have to run it and find out.(??, ????) In some sense, the same might be true of human cognition: we have to go through the (physical?) process of thinking to figure something out—it doesn’t come immediately. Even strokes of genius arrive as the result of long thinking about the problem: you don’t just suddenly know the solution to a problem you’ve never heard of or thought about.
For me, now, I counsil patience. I’m working on figuring things out, but it’s not going to come as quickly as I’d like it to. Every day I learn something new, so maybe in a few decades I’ll know something interesting. For now, I have to remain in a posture of ignorant humility—how else will I figure everything out?
