Finally starting to notice this striking inverse correlation between
- whether something is confusing
- whether you've read a book about it
This "google things as you need them" habit, I think, It's actually pretty bad
Somehow I taught myself this helplessness. Struggle over years. Feel like I'll never get it.
Have you read a book about it?
Well, no
@GinBaby Yeah I had that example in mind. Watching you do that with CSS is largely what made me realize I've been doing it with so many things.
@chris_martin Books are awesome, paper books especially. But reading them may take weeks at least and months and longer. Not to mention that actual understanding of the read things comes far later.
So it isn't always worth it, IMO, to read books: the additional benefits are small compared to the efforts. OTOH, it's sometimes necessary when entering completely new field.
P.S. I hope it wasn't meant as a critique of my lame comments :)
@amiloradovsky Hah, no, not aimed at you. This train of thought was kicked off by my decision to finally read a LaTeX manual instead of just hating it
@amiloradovsky @chris_martin ... and, do you now hate it less? That's take a *really* good manual
@chris_martin If you are a Emacs user, Org-mode may be often handier than "pure" (La)TeX, even if not that powerful:
@amiloradovsky Thanks, I'm writin a book tho, I need the power
@chris_martin vaguely related: the phenomenon of someone who seems really smart about everything, except the particular fields you know about, and then you're like 🤔
@chris_martin Lord love the Wikipedia maths page editors, but they do NOT have a clue how to TEACH maths concepts.
@natecull Math on Wikipedia seems like an impossible task. The encyclopedia concept is comprehensible self-contained articles. With the tree of learning for math and some other disciplines... I just don't know how you can ever decide what level any given math article should be written at.
@natecull @chris_martin that's why I always feel super ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED when I understand a Wikipedia math article. it means I now understand a lot of background stuff I didn't before. I'm climbing that fuckin tree, if it kills me. :P
@chris_martin @natecull the only hints I can discern at to what "level" something should be written at are the "English" and "Simple English" language options.
@chris_martin corollary: The phrase "those who can't do, teach" has a double meaning of teaching in order to learn doing.
@chris_martin at least in our industry, the way things are structured prevent it. e.g.: "here's a ticket that involved topic X, which you don't know" "okay, I'm going to take the next two weeks to learn about X" "no, you're going to google just enough to fix the ticket"
@chris_martin Been having similar feelings for a while. Starting to read proper things, finally.
@chris_martin this *does* explain a lot
@chris_martin i've never read a book about commonlisp and i know that! as i was typing that sentence i realized i've read almost every single book in circulation on the subject but just kinda took it for granted somehow & it suddenly makes sense that very few of my more complicated ksh scripts work very well.
@chris_martin yeh you were just tellin me this about my struggles with CSS babe, remember? i need a CSS book. i ain't touchin CSS again until i have read a CSS book. not for you, not for no one. <3