It's hard to build an oscillator

When I was starting out in electronics I found the easiest way to build an oscillator was to build an amplifier and the easiest way to build an amplifier was to build an oscillator. I guess the trick is to be 7 years old and have far more ambition than skill. Couldn't guess at how many tries it took me to make an amplifier that didn't oscillate and when I moved onto oscillators, they never oscillated but they did amplify. In that first year or so, I couldn't actually read resistor color codes, but I thought I could.

> the trick is to be 7 years old and have far more ambition than skill

Never lose this

Apologies for my bluntness, but in my humble opinion, American society would be better if it had fewer adults like this.

Being able to enjoy and find worth in the process regardless of the outcome is bad? Are we man-children if we don't treat everything as if it were as serious as cancer? I'm not really sure what you are trying to say.

Ambition develops skill. One of the problems with American society is people thinking they have skill when they don't. If people knew they had ambition and no skill, they'd try things and learn.

that's a helluva thing to just drop. What are your priors? Are you American yourself, or living in or near it? In what way would it be better? How so?

Often the biggest thing holding you back from doing something is the sensible, mature understanding that it’s impossible.

I think the scenario of childlike wonder and limitless ambition is a little different to the scenario of embraced ignorance and wilful misrepresentation of any surviving facts in furtherance of the agenda du jour.

Yes, but then again, we could make a very similar comment about Hackernews.

If you combine a 3 year-old, whose favorite word is "why?", and the ambition of a 7 year-old you might just end up with the most productive genius possible.

You are likely talking about a different aspect of child-mindedness than the person you were responding to.

Why talk about Americans now?

Wait until you see what some of the people in other countries do when they try to imitate Americans.

It makes you think, why even bother?

Not my downvote BTW.

Dunning-Kruger actually applies to everyone, especially to people who openly and over-generalizingly criticize an entire nation's supposed lack of skill.

Only because I don't know the rest of the world well enough to say.

Add the social insecurity of a pubescent, and you suddenly have a madman knowitall (with almost no actual knowledge) that slows that learning to a drip.

It's a miracle high schools are able to achieve anything, really.

Growing up, I never had the budget of a real TV studio, but had equipment that would approximate a real TV studio. I would come up with ways to recreate what they were doing because it could clearly be done, but by using totally different equipment that only looked like it was up for the task. Asking the real TV people if it could be done, they'd say no. I'd say hide and watch (too young to have a beer to ask them to hold).

Sometimes, the box a degree stuffs you into with all of that learning often means losing some creative out-of-the-box thinking abilities. I get away with things all the time because I didn't know you weren't supposed to not do this, yet now that I have, it works just fine.

Yes, American citizen living in the SF Bay Area.

Ambition should always outpace skill. Otherwise, how would we get anywhere?

And, in some circumstances, they'll oscillate.