> you must accept a deep and abiding peacefulness in not knowing very much at all about most of the stuff you actually work with in your day-to-day life
That's how 90% percent of the people think (the ones I only care about using and manipulating to achieve my purposes - not necessarily egotistical purposes, mind it, I might actually ask charity donation from them), but not how I and the 10% I care to hang around with do. For example, you don't kneed to know the details of how a car works, but knowing what an internal combustion engine is and that most breaks work by rubbing two things together and basic stuff like this is what everyone should know - my grandma knows this and she can reason heuristically about this even if she has never been to school and can't read or write. Same about computers - if you are an IT manager or even a sales or marketing guy in something computer related, if, for example, you don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted code and what this has to do with portability and, in consequence, cost of multi-platform development, then you're a mindless tool (probably a bad "tool") and I'll have no respect for you and your rights.
You can't separate how it works type of knowledge from how to use it one, no matter how good the abstractions and UIs are. If it's something you're working with, then you should know the principles of how it works!
A lot of people subconsciously define stupidity as "not knowing what I know" and I'm afraid you've succumbed to the same illness.
Why should you know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car? What's the point in knowing the effects of compiled and interpreted code on portability when so many other factors could make that basic knowledge irrelevant?
You save your actual argument for your last paragraph (you can't use it if you don't know how it works) but you never give any examples or explain why that'd even be plausible.
It's not about what I know, it's just that I make a real effort to understand how the things that I do really work, at least at a basic concepts level. For example when I learned a bit about about how to cook I researched a bit about cooking chemistry, when I go to a foreign country I research a bit about the culture, religion and politics. And so on. And it's less effort than it seems. I think seeing knowledge in general as "fun" and just having fun knowing things for knowledge's sake makes your mind work in an entirely different way. Sure, you can google everything, half of what you know is very imprecise or false, and you forget half of the things you learn shortly after learning them. And having a mind rich in "trivia" may impair you in "think fast" situations and sometimes (though rarely) even make you seem "slow" because your mind is weighing extra facts and connections that may be irrelevant while others get faster to the solution because they don't even know these extra "paths" exist and don't waste time exploring them. But it simply makes you "richer" and in a weird way, happier, and not by inflated self-esteem that you know more than others. I know most people think along the lines of "just live life, use stuff that works and enjoy" but I just can't imagine living like this and I find it hard to have more than a superficial conversation with people that live and see the world this way. About the last paragraph, the answer is: there needn't be any answer. I just choose to think this way and I like people that think more like me and I will respect them more and favor them (even unjustly) in all situations. Maybe "my kind" (or at least the corresponding meme) will have higher chances of survival in the evolutionary game of life, maybe not, it's just the dice I "choose" to play :) (Disclaimer: yeah, "you should" should be "I respect/favor you more if you", and yes, I love good abstractions and UIs and I understand their value).
Why is not knowing things so fashionable these days? Especially in a community of people I'd think would be taking things apart just to learn how they work.
> Why should you know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car?
Easy—so when you go to a mechanic with an exhaust blockage and he tries to sell you a new transmission, you know enough to tell him where to stick his transmission.
Yes, this actually happened to me. Thankfully, I knew enough about cars to know I needed another mechanic.
Obviously not every driver needs to be an automotive engineer or even a technician, but it's a little silly to throw up your hands and give up on knowing anything when the basics aren't that hard to understand.
> What's the point in knowing the effects of compiled and interpreted code on portability when so many other factors could make that basic knowledge irrelevant?
At first, I thought "the effects of compiled and interpreted code on portability" was an absurd thing to talk about. Compiled vs. interpreted is a pretty fuzzy distinction (Java is compiled, but only to bytecode that's then interpreted, but that interpreter just just-in-time compiles to native code anyway), and a compiled language doesn't inherently mean you're stuck on one CPU or OS until you rewrite your whole application—sometimes you just need to recompile it. But then I have the basic knowledge that "compiled" often means "compiled to and shipped as native binaries," which matters a lot if I'm trying to run Jim Bob's Digital Accountant on my SPARC workstation running LunarOS 2.7. If that software's only distributed as a Windows binary, I'm pretty much out of luck (unless I happen to have an emulator handy that interprets Windows binaries, but there's that fuzzy distinction again), but if it's a Java application there's a chance it'll just work, as long as Java's been ported to LunarOS on SPARC.
The moral of this story: you should know this stuff so when people talk about it it's not all nonsensical babbling and you don't have to just smile and nod. And, so you can reason about things and know when someone's feeding you a load of BS.
Or, so you don't go off and, say, write an article on how Apple is going to switch to ARM so they don't have to maintain two separate versions of their applications for phones and tablets vs. laptops because you don't know code doesn't have to be rewritten from scratch for each, but that you do need a different UI on a phone than you do on a laptop.
In general, know more things so the world makes more sense, and so you make more sense interacting with the world.
> In general, know more things so the world makes more sense, and so you make more sense interacting with the world.
No disagreement there. It's good to know things. But it's petty to label people as stupid because they don't know <random fact, skill or theory that you happen to know about> and that's what I was railing against.
I'd hire anytime a guy who knows how something works over someone who knows how to correctly spell the name of that thing, or even knows how the damned things is called. I've known people way smarter than I am that have way worse spelling, grammar and even basic communication skills than I have. We seriously overvalue communication related skills just because they form one's ..."gift wrapping" (plus the thing with most programmers being pathologically sensitive to grammar and spelling mistakes, but this is somewhat understandable :) ).
I'd hire anytime a guy who knows how something works over someone who knows how to correctly spell the name of that thing, or even knows how the damned things is called.
These things are very frequently closely related in at least one direction. Useful as a filter.
I've known people way smarter than I am that have way worse spelling, grammar and even basic communication skills than I have.
I work with the English language every day, and so I have no respect for the rights of people who can't even spell the word "need" correctly. Is that what you're saying? :-)
Instead of comments attacking a geek elitist worldview, I get folks pissed off 'cause I mistyped "breaks" and "kneed" :) ...and I actually find it amusing after almost a dozen whiskey eggnogs ...funny times the holidays :)
That's how 90% percent of the people think (the ones I only care about using and manipulating to achieve my purposes - not necessarily egotistical purposes, mind it, I might actually ask charity donation from them), but not how I and the 10% I care to hang around with do. For example, you don't kneed to know the details of how a car works, but knowing what an internal combustion engine is and that most breaks work by rubbing two things together and basic stuff like this is what everyone should know - my grandma knows this and she can reason heuristically about this even if she has never been to school and can't read or write. Same about computers - if you are an IT manager or even a sales or marketing guy in something computer related, if, for example, you don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted code and what this has to do with portability and, in consequence, cost of multi-platform development, then you're a mindless tool (probably a bad "tool") and I'll have no respect for you and your rights.
You can't separate how it works type of knowledge from how to use it one, no matter how good the abstractions and UIs are. If it's something you're working with, then you should know the principles of how it works!