I have a model/interpretation for why their models are more complicated.
When you don't know something very well you have to consider a lot more possibilities, your search space is much larger. If you already know where you have to go you don't need the maps of the entire city, you can just get the section that covers your expected route.
When I entered the real world after my study (15 years ago), or maybe it was just a function of growing older, over time I realized that the biggest difference between people "who know" and those who don't is that they know all the things something is NOT, and all the ways something does NOT behave. When I compare my intuition or feelings for a big database system with how I feel today, I don't actually know all that much more in hard facts. But I handled such systems enough that I know what to expect andd what not. That means I could cut the uncertainty. It's hard to describe.
Or when I think back of how suspicious and even frightened I was when I sneaked into the garage when I was a kid and started the engine of my grandfathers car. No driving, just the engine. On a deeper level I did not have any experience on what to expect, what to feel. The intellectual level is no replacement, that's other parts of the brain, it does not replace actually doing something. Back in that car just by feel my "expectation space" was far too large compared to what actually happened, and what today I would expect when I start an engine. Knowing by having witnessed others do it was no replacement for getting my own experience (but it was enough to let me override my fears and give it a try)!
After studying a lot of medical topics over the last couple of years I realized the difference between a doctor and somebody like me 10 years ago, i.e. with zero education in any medical topic or genetics or biology (everything from school long forgotten so even that had to be relearned) is not how much more they know - the gaps even today are incredible (lots and lots of details, but on a whole-system level all they can do is trial and error like any non-medical person; no way to be confident about any drug without clinical trial, not even close, and even in the early phases it's all about actual experiments) - it's that they recognize "BS". They know what does not work much more than they know what works.
Okay, I think I did a terrible job expressing my fuzzy internal model. Maybe these two parts: The route of steps taken to map a territory in the first place looks overly complicated compared to what is needed to get somewhere when you already have a map, and doing it yourself is very different from being told.
That is very interesting. Before CS, I studied law and I noticed the following: I understood most of the very abstract concepts only when I learned what they were not. For example: In my country, there are several types of public lawsuits. I found it very hard to understand them from a "positive" definition. It only made sense when knowing why lawsuit type A was not lawsuit type B. I think it has something to do with the fact that they all are part of a larger system, but I also find it difficult to precisly express that. But I feel that – especially with abstract concepts – that it's what something is not that gives things it's shape.
Sounds like a mason working on a sculpture. You need to identify and cut off all the superfluous parts.
Abstraction is generalization of special cases. If you only consider one case, you can't generalize from it. Only when you get two, can you work out the differences and the similarities. It's like forming the intersection of two sets: You remove all the elements that are not part of both.
I wonder how accurate this process is. If you're not careful, you might confuse experience with being narrow-minded. Thinking outside the box requires you to consider exactly what you know you don't know.
> If you're not careful, you might confuse experience with being narrow-minded.
That's why we say the old generation has to die for new ideas to gain power. You are more open to new idea when you feel unsure and still have to build your internal model. Once it's somewhat settled the brain is reluctant to significant further change unless presented with overwhelming evidence - but it has also built up strong filters so that recognizing the evidence also is harder. See progress in science in general or medicine in particular.
When you don't know something very well you have to consider a lot more possibilities, your search space is much larger. If you already know where you have to go you don't need the maps of the entire city, you can just get the section that covers your expected route.
When I entered the real world after my study (15 years ago), or maybe it was just a function of growing older, over time I realized that the biggest difference between people "who know" and those who don't is that they know all the things something is NOT, and all the ways something does NOT behave. When I compare my intuition or feelings for a big database system with how I feel today, I don't actually know all that much more in hard facts. But I handled such systems enough that I know what to expect andd what not. That means I could cut the uncertainty. It's hard to describe.
Or when I think back of how suspicious and even frightened I was when I sneaked into the garage when I was a kid and started the engine of my grandfathers car. No driving, just the engine. On a deeper level I did not have any experience on what to expect, what to feel. The intellectual level is no replacement, that's other parts of the brain, it does not replace actually doing something. Back in that car just by feel my "expectation space" was far too large compared to what actually happened, and what today I would expect when I start an engine. Knowing by having witnessed others do it was no replacement for getting my own experience (but it was enough to let me override my fears and give it a try)!
After studying a lot of medical topics over the last couple of years I realized the difference between a doctor and somebody like me 10 years ago, i.e. with zero education in any medical topic or genetics or biology (everything from school long forgotten so even that had to be relearned) is not how much more they know - the gaps even today are incredible (lots and lots of details, but on a whole-system level all they can do is trial and error like any non-medical person; no way to be confident about any drug without clinical trial, not even close, and even in the early phases it's all about actual experiments) - it's that they recognize "BS". They know what does not work much more than they know what works.
Okay, I think I did a terrible job expressing my fuzzy internal model. Maybe these two parts: The route of steps taken to map a territory in the first place looks overly complicated compared to what is needed to get somewhere when you already have a map, and doing it yourself is very different from being told.