Have you ever used a zipper?
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@sinvega there is a fun example Tom Griffiths (a computational cognitive scientist) talks about using in his classes/and in his book: imagine that you are far removed from our civilization a thousand years into the future and you've dug up a cash register. How would you go about trying to learn how it worked? What it was for? What could you infer from it (for instance, could you understand the rules of arithmetic given a cash register)?
@grimalkina that IS fun! An old school one I think, sure, assuming it's opened up so you can see it (bit of a cheat but), sure, you can probably see that the springs spring back when you push them, and the wheels roll so it doesn't scrape or get stuck... and maybe that pressing that button pushes down a thing that's holding the spring back...
but that's like 20 concepts away from what it's for and how it actually functions, let alone how you'd make one. And even that depends on "wheel" and "spring", which you might only understand that "this spins / this pushes", not how or why, certainly not on a theoretical physics level
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@grimalkina assuming this is about software I've always found "how do you fix a stuck zipper" more valuable knowledge than how a zipper works.
@deech one can be conditional on the other though!
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Right, and there's some slip knot magic that happens. I'm not too concerned about not knowing how a sewing machine works in depth, it was just on the list.
@NuclearOatmeal @grimalkina I just said it mostly for the last bit, I wasn't curious about everyday things when younger. Thought everything worthwhile had to be specialised, science, somehow uber important.
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@grimalkina that IS fun! An old school one I think, sure, assuming it's opened up so you can see it (bit of a cheat but), sure, you can probably see that the springs spring back when you push them, and the wheels roll so it doesn't scrape or get stuck... and maybe that pressing that button pushes down a thing that's holding the spring back...
but that's like 20 concepts away from what it's for and how it actually functions, let alone how you'd make one. And even that depends on "wheel" and "spring", which you might only understand that "this spins / this pushes", not how or why, certainly not on a theoretical physics level
@sinvega he talks about how you might derive functional rules too (eg that identical items in a grocery store should always be the same price every time you ring them up) given the right components and observations!
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@grimalkina we realize that sharing this misses the point of your thread
it's just that hardly anybody ever does ask and we wanted to share the image.......@ireneista please!! It's the best kind of reply! I love how many kinds of knowledge and teaching threads like this elicit
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@sinvega he talks about how you might derive functional rules too (eg that identical items in a grocery store should always be the same price every time you ring them up) given the right components and observations!
@grimalkina any time I've been in a job interview, for basically any job, if they do the "what's most important / what does this job need" question, I said "empathy". And this is empathy to me! You're conceiving of another person, that they might want and intend things, independently but potentially just as you would
At heart I suppose I think of empathy as "why?", and one of many reasons the idea of "emotional vs logical" is bollocks
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@ireneista please!! It's the best kind of reply! I love how many kinds of knowledge and teaching threads like this elicit
@grimalkina oh, well, good! yeah that particular illustration was super helpful to us as kids, and it's not a topic that is taught nearly as widely to children anymore, so a while back we decided we wanted to have it handy and went and found a scan
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in re zippers: been studying interwar sewing books, especially 1920s, exactly because they DO NOT deal with zippers. they weren't cheap until after WW2.
the zippered bomber jackets of WW1 were expensive to make at home. it’s why they became a status symbol among the moneyed classes.
on the other hand, after WW2 they were cheap army surplus. hence the 1950s poverty coda of the leather jacket, tshirt & jeans ―which, as cheap surplus clothes, didn't have zippers yet.
so zippers…
so zippers are really interesting as something people take for granted in clothes but they weren't always there.
it’s why i wanted to study the logic of crafting pants in a zipperless world.
well, for starters, pants aren’t trousers because pants are held up by a belt whereas trousers are held up by a fly.
a zipperless world forces you to fit the pants with just enough ease to keep the pants up without a belt or with an open fly.
it’s technique over tech. /🧵
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina there was an article I read on this long ago that I can no longer find that talked about how your grandma's recipes are simple, but you can't make them because of the context she left out. She was an expert and wrote down the details she needed to remember the recipe, but not enough that a novice could make it. Then it compared the differences in what would need to be said for the levels of expertise. Really made it hit home for me. Wish I could find the article again.
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina no, right, it's not possible to learn everything along with how to explain it, not all that useful to, shouldn't be the goal, shouldn't be a thing people have to do to solve social problems, and all that
nonetheless, it's fun and we've spent our whole life trying ><
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Also just as a PS, it's neither possible nor very adaptive to ask yourself to have an overwhelmingly detailed explanation of mechanisms for everything you encounter, so that's not the goal. Groups of people need to fluently work at many different levels of abstraction.
The key is matching the level of understanding to the tasks and problems that we have! And often, coordinating different depths of expertise!
But we can benefit from having metacognitive skills!
@grimalkina
Delightful thread, thank you!I could explain all of the examples you gave, but for many years I was an apprentice and then an instrument technician, so got a ton of insight into how stuff works - BUT dig a little deeper and there are always more layers and interconnected systems that are familiar by mysterious
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@grimalkina As a result of this thread I went on a binge learning about the history of zipper design.
I am now using graphite pencils to properly lubricate all of my zippers, thank you very much.
@sidereal @grimalkina I learned this from the luthier in my neighborhood: you can put some graphite in the little divots in the nut of a stringed instrument (the part that sticks up as the "zeroth" fret) and that makes tuning less "sticky" (strings much less likely to get stuck and then jump out of tune unexpectedly)
thanks for making me think about metacognition today!
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina I think I can say yes to all of these, but I'll check by writing down my answers before finding the genuine answers!
I very much enjoy explaining these sorts of things to people, but I have met very few who want to hear my explanations!
Thus I suspect most humans do not know how those things work, not at all.
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Have you ever used a zipper? Odds are you have. Are you pretty good at it? Odds are! You've probably successfully used a zipper many, many times. You probably can't even remember when and where you learned how to operate a zipper. If you're a good zipper user and we sat you down in a room and gave you ten zippered garments, you'd probably fluently and flawlessly be able to zip them up and down.
Now......can you explain how a zipper works?
@grimalkina I think I could, but not because I used them often, bug because I was gifted a book that explained a lot of different technologies using mammoths.
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@jawnsy @grimalkina It's okay, Jonathan, I can't explain where you are either
@ricci @grimalkina Questions that I've spent my life searching to answer:
Who am I?
What am I?
Where am I?
When am I?
Why am I?
How am I?I have gone to search for myself. If you should arrive before I do, please wait for me.
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@grimalkina I love this kind of stuff! I cannot explain how an aqualung regulator works but I know the rest. My special interest is in collecting facts that are entirely irrelevant to my life
SCUBA regulator is absurdly simple, which is good because complex things fail in complex ways, and complex failures underwater all lead inexorably to the same outcome.
There's a rubber diaphragm with one side facing the part that goes in your mouth (mouthpiece). The mouthpiece has some one-way valves so when you exhale, air goes out to the water, but when you inhale, water doesn't come in.
That rubber diaphragm will, thus, move inward when you inhale. The diaphragm is attached to a lever on the other side, so when you breathe in, the lever moves. The other end of the lever is hooked to a tiny needle valve, which lets air from the feed hose into the breathing chamber of the mouthpiece. When you stop inhaling, the pressure on the inside and outside of the diaphragm equalizes, it moves back to the "flat" position, and the needle valve closes. Any overpressure just goes out the vents to the water - sometimes that needle valve will stick and you get way more air than you want, but it's not harmful to you (aside from wasting breathable air and shortening the duration of your dive) because it just rushes out the vents.
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SCUBA regulator is absurdly simple, which is good because complex things fail in complex ways, and complex failures underwater all lead inexorably to the same outcome.
There's a rubber diaphragm with one side facing the part that goes in your mouth (mouthpiece). The mouthpiece has some one-way valves so when you exhale, air goes out to the water, but when you inhale, water doesn't come in.
That rubber diaphragm will, thus, move inward when you inhale. The diaphragm is attached to a lever on the other side, so when you breathe in, the lever moves. The other end of the lever is hooked to a tiny needle valve, which lets air from the feed hose into the breathing chamber of the mouthpiece. When you stop inhaling, the pressure on the inside and outside of the diaphragm equalizes, it moves back to the "flat" position, and the needle valve closes. Any overpressure just goes out the vents to the water - sometimes that needle valve will stick and you get way more air than you want, but it's not harmful to you (aside from wasting breathable air and shortening the duration of your dive) because it just rushes out the vents.
This is referred to as the "secondary" regulator, BTW, because it's fed by a hose with a couple hundred PSI (10 bar) as opposed to the tank, which starts in the 3500 PSI range and drops to a couple hundred.
The primary regulator is a similar setup with a flexible metal diaphragm, it knocks the tank pressure down to a level that the secondary mechanism can handle. Usually a primary regulator will have several high pressure ports (for things like pressure gauges) and several low pressure ports (for secondary regulator, backup secondary regulator, buoyancy vest, etc.)
Now you've got the whole list!
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@grimalkina there was an article I read on this long ago that I can no longer find that talked about how your grandma's recipes are simple, but you can't make them because of the context she left out. She was an expert and wrote down the details she needed to remember the recipe, but not enough that a novice could make it. Then it compared the differences in what would need to be said for the levels of expertise. Really made it hit home for me. Wish I could find the article again.
Take 3 eggs and 1 pound of fujulicated flower.
Persertrate until you reach mildly furnacious consistency influkting raisins with vigour!
Place in an oven preheated to molfious temperature and bake until shanpy !Enjoy!
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@StompyRobot I would think absolutely!!
@grimalkina @StompyRobot And also for the zipper experts to understand that the rest of us don't need to know exactly how zippers work in order to use them - they just work well enough that we can use them. This is a comment on computing ...
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In this study, the researchers asked about a range of stimuli, which in my humble opinion* are really fun to quiz yourself on. Can you explain:
- how a sewing machine works
- how a can opener works
- how a flush toilet operates
- how the heart pumps blood
- how piano keys make soundSome of these are far more elaborate, haha:
- how the aqualung regulates air-pressure
- how a transistor works*granted...I became a psychologist so maybe my sense of fun is warped
@grimalkina As an engineer, I have both
- a surface level grasp of how most of these things work (because I have at one time or another learned it, had to make repairs, or had to figure out whether repairs were possible)
AND
- copies of "The Way Things Work" and similar books, where mammoths explain them with easy to follow diagrams!
