Interview with gwern

I take the Feynman view here; vain memory tricks are not themselves net new production, so just look known things up in the book.

Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

No, look. If a student (I'm not a professor, just a post-doc) doesn't know this stuff, I'll point them to the book so they can look it up, and move on. But the student will not tell me I'm "not even wrong" with the arrogance of fifty cardinals while at the same time pretending to be an expert [1]. It's OK to not know, it's OK to not know that you don't know, but arrogant ignorance is not a good look on anyone.

And there's a limit to what you need to look up in a book. The limit moves further up the more you work with a certain kind of tool or study a certain kind of knowledge. I have to look up trigonometry every single time I need it because I only use it sparingly. I don't need to look up SLD-Resolution, which is my main subject. How much would Feynman need to look up when debating physics?

So when someone like Feynman talks about physics, you listen carefully because you know they know their shit and a certain kind of nerd deeply appreciates deep knowledge. When someone elbows themselves in the limelight and demands everyone treats them as an expert, but they don't know the basics, what do you conclude? I conclude that they're pretending to know a bunch of stuff they don't know.

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[1] ... some do. But they're students so it's OK, they're just excited to have learned so much and don't yet know how much they don't. You explain the mistake, point them to the book, and move on.

Ok so you’re arrogantly practicing English writing now and producing little more than a philosophy that just zigs around to maintain your narrative.

“Debating physics” in academia is little more than reciting preferred symbolic logic. The map is not the terrain; to borrow from Feynman again, who says in his lectures it’s not good to get hung up on such stuff. So you’re just making this about rhetorical competition, boring gamesmanship. Which like I said, isn’t the point of engineering. Dialectics don’t ship, they keep professors employed though.

Whichever way it’s written, physics still seems to work. So the value of STEM is more about the application than the knowing.

@newmanpo Your comment is [dead] so I can't directly reply to it, but you're assuming thing about me that are wrong. I say above I'm a post-doc. You should understand what this means: I'm the workhorse in an academic research lab where I'm expected to make stuff work, and then write papers about it. I write code and tell computers when to jump. I'm not a philosopher by any stretch of the term and just to be clear, a scientist is not a philosopher (not any more).

Edit: dude, come on. That's no way to have a debate. Other times I'm the one who gets all the downvotes. You gotta soldier on through it and say your thing anyway. Robust criticism is great but being prissy about downvotes just makes HN downvote you more.