Reality has a surprising amount of detail

[Ian_Curtis]

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (Blog Post)

My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings we owned.

That’s how I came to spend a substantial part of my teenage years replacing fences, digging trenches, and building flooring and sheds. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail.

This turns out to explain why its so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field.

This blog post was mentioned in a podcast I was listening to, and I thought it was so good I wanted to pass it along here. When I was a student, I think FRC was the first time I realized how reality has a surprising amount of detail. Reading the post I reflected on my own behavior, which is something along the lines of my awareness of that surprising amount of complexity in everything can stop me from attempting things I could probably eventually work through. Similarly it is interesting to think in the age of COTS, do students get the same dose of detail awareness that we used to when basically nothing was plug and play? Maybe they don’t, and also maybe that’s a good thing?

[gerthworm]

My analogy:

All technical fields… heck, all human interactions… contain a myriad of bottomless pits. You can pick almost any topic you want, and go as deep as you want in it. There are infinite things to learn.

Many people go through life just walking around the pits, blissfully ignorant of their existence, or fearful of what might be down there.

FRC’s job is to show students the pit.

Mentors and COTS parts serve the same purpose. They’ve been down in the pit before, and can lead students around, giving a guided tour. When properly applied, students get a guided tour of many pits. Ideally, enough that they come back to investigate themselves.

But they never get lost inside one of them. And they never get shoved into a pit without wanting to be there.