Speaking of sharing random thoughts, here's something I've been trying to understand about myself for over a decade.
While at university, I've overall had way more trouble with tasks like
- figure out how a lecture is organized and where it happens
- figure out how to use a program
- install a necessary IDE
- figure out what modules I need to do and where and how to register
than the actual subjects. I've outright skipped several lectures because taking them would have required me to get some specific kind of software to work. I've lost several semesters worth of time over related issues. But the difference isn't fundamentally about technical stuff vs. organizational stuff because I tend to feel similarly within a subject. Back in school, one experience I often had was feeling that the material is very easy, e.g., in math, but another experience I often had was that of being completely lost, e.g. in physics. For everyone else, there seemed to be a spectrum between these two things, whereas I seemed to only occupy either end. But the same phenomenon did not exist in subjects where it's about memorization rather then understanding; there my experience seemed typical.
I think the underlying mechanism is something like, I experience a great amount of negative emotion whenever I have to think about things in my belief network that point to other things that I don't understand, and most other people do not. As soon as I lost the plot in physics, I mostly stopped taking in new information because thinking about it was unpleasant. As long as I didn't understand how git works, having to juggle with commands or try to fix things if they don't work was super unpleasant, which both meant that I got worse at it and that I didn't try it much. The existence of git has been such a nightmare throughout my time at the university. There are lots more examples like this.
This explains why I have such a hard time skipping even one detail while working through a script. As soon as I do, I feel this immense dissatisfaction and desire to stop reading.
It also explains why I seem to care so much more than anyone else about how good the source material is, and why there are so many tutorials/lectures/videos that I find just utterly intolerable. I even tend to get angry when reading something that explains things in terms of other things that i don't understand. I've struggled with Linear Algebra for years during university, across at least three different courses, then worked through an entire book with all exercises in just under three weeks and had so much fun with it, too.
it also explains why I have an unusually deep understanding of things like probability (instinctively spent a lot of time explaining things to myself down to the last detail).
It also explains why I like math, or games like dominion. And while I like coding things like suduku solvers but have trouble with anything relying on external libraries.
And it explains why I've improved so much at all of this in the past year or so. Since the problem is primarily upsteam of feeling and flinching away from negative emotions,
the solution to everything is just more mindfulness
I think I've finally solved this. This all sounds right.
What made me think about this now was reading about all of this anti vax stuff and how people in that camp
cite science that they cannot possibly understand
(Natural News) There’s a secret layer of information in your cells called messenger RNA, that’s located between DNA and proteins, that serves as a critical link. Now, in a medical shocker to the whole world of vaccine philosophy, scientists at Sloan Kettering found that mRNA itself carries cancer CAUSING changes – changes that genetic tests don’t even analyze, flying completely under the radar of oncologists across the globe.
To me, at least up until my excursion into understanding biology yesterday, this is completely meaningless. I don't know what a protein is, so the technical explanation means nothing; all I take away is (a) you claim there is evidence for the mrna vaccine causing cancer, and (b) you claim this was hard to spot. Conversely, I would never write something analogous, at least not on purpose. Either I try to explain something or I don't, but I would never just go one step backward and explain it in terms of concepts that the audience can't understand, either. But I think most people can read stuff like this and go away feeling like they understand more than before.
But this is totally not specific to anti vaxers. People throw around little bits of sciency explanations all the time for all sorts of things, e.g., 'the vaccine works by creating spike proteins'. Most people probably don't even have a sharp distinction between the policy level (" I think this because XYZ said it") and the gear level ("I think this because I understand how the process works").
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Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 346664 times)