It occurs to me that something that I know and use all the time is not something I've seen expressed within the electronics realm, and especially for very beginning beginners in electronics, so I thought I'd get it down explicitly here.
(1) Some things matter, some things don't.
(2) Knowing *which* things matter and which don't is crucial to success.
(3) If you don't know which things matter, your success is tied to incredibly tedious attention to every detail.
(4) Elegance and excellence in design depends on forcing some things not to matter.
Beginners are taught to follow instructions to the letter to achieve any success. This is in fact critical, because beginners don't have the base of knowledge that lets them separate things that matter from things that don't at a glance, almost unconsciously.
When I was a beginner, it was almost infuriating to me to hear an elder say "...yeah, that's different, but it doesn't matter here..." because I had set up the idea that everything mattered. And it did to me, because I had not yet learned to separate them for myself.
Knowing how to separate them is only done by intimate knowledge and experience. Every time an elder said that infuriating line, I got a little clearer picture, because it uncovered another subtle part of things that I hadn't thought of before. Over time, they added up.
That the "matter-ing-ness" of things can be influenced is another idea that took a while to sink in. Good designers can force things to matter or not matter. In complex designs where everything matters, the design is fragile and rigid. Any change in anything causes it to not work right. In designs where you can whop in any old part any have it work, the original designer took some pains to force the matteringness into only those things that were critical. Case in point: transistor biasing; good transistor bias design is tolerant of power supply variation, temperature extremes, and transistor characteristics to the point where it will do something almost right if the parts values are even close and almost any old transistor will do.
Yeah, yeah, I can hear you thinking "R.G.'s gone off the deep end comtemplating his too-prominent navel." Probably so.
I have this other theory that any possible situation has a C&W song already written about. In this case it's "The Gambler". You know - you gotta know when to hold 'em...
And of course, discussing the importance of what matters.....matters. :lol:
I am an intermittent follower of research on the psychology of expertise; that is what constitutes being an "expert", what's different about their thinking, and how you get to that point.
A great deal of expertise research is conducted with chess players. Not because chess players are any sort of cut above, but because people who are serious about chess document their games, and are also ranked internationally on that basis. In other words, it is easier to study chess players and explore what makes the difference between rising to rank X and only rising to rank Y than it would be to study the same thing in, say, chefs, kindergarten teachers, or car mechanics.
In the history of chess programs and simulators, one of the classic strategies was to devise algorithms for the software to "look ahead" and consider the implications of many more moves by their human opponent, the idea being that the machine (or any player for that matter) is more susceptible to their opponent's moves if they don'tthink far ahead enough and overlook "that" move (oh....yeah.....right.....THAT move :x ). Faster CPU speed and general throughput enabled these algorithms to be more efficient, but humans continued to win despite the ever-increasing number of MIPS. Ultimately, it would be heuristics, rather than algorithms that would unseat humans as chess champs.
If you talk to chess players of different levels of expertise, though (and trust me, I ain't one of them), one of the things you see is that experts actually *don't* consider that many more moves than novices do, either current moves or subsequent implied moves (potentiated by an immediate one). Rather, their strength lies in recognizing what doesn't matter and so restricting their mulling over to that which they recognize as potentially mattering. In other words, what experts are able to bring to the table is that they can cover more ground with the same or less work, simply by being able to allocate time and effort efficiently on the basis of knowing where it yields benefit.
In the electronic design or troubleshooting context, expertise would show itself by, again, allowing one to separate things into the "matters" and "doesn't matter much" bins. Other folks here are leagues above me in terms of blazing trails and designing things, but after years and years and years of twiddling knobs, building stuff wrong then right, and staring at schematics, one of the things that brings comfort and satisfaction to me is an ever-increasing capacity to zero in on one or two things about a design that DO make a difference. To have someone say "I just wish it were more XYZ" and be able to respond with "Oh, just change that part right there", or make a suggestion about adding just one more control and have it make a world of difference in terms of usability. It brings me pleasure to be able to do it, and brings me added pleasure to find I am able to do it more as time moves on.
Which brings us to time. Expertise researchers tend to be in relative agreement that it generally requires about 10,000 hrs of practice in any area to arrive at expert levels of performance. What *counts* as practice is another matter. In our context, it could include simply thnking about something you tried out earlier that day during the bus ride home, comparing ToneFrenzy or ROG clips for slightly different designs, staring at 4 versions of a Superfuzz, building something "wrong" for the 5th exasperating time that weekend, watching your scope as you adjust a trimpot, OR going on a weekend retreat with your best gal and your Hill and Horowitz ("Start without me honey, I want to finish this chapter. There's spare batteries in the backpack."). All of this amounts to practice and connecting every little tidbit you know in the area such that you can say "When trying to do *this*, those things matter, but if you're trying to do *that*, then those things matter more".
Of course, it's like that with life too, which is why some cognitive researchers who study "wisdom", treat it as a form of expertise; wise people know what matters and doesn't in life.
I'm in a very happy mood. Just came back from a touch of gluttony at an Indian Buffet across the street from work. I've been getting into Indian cuisine lately, and studying my cookbook, studying the shelves at the local Indian supermarket, and trading notes with a guy I know in Bombay. Not quite up to talking shop with the grannies, but looking forward to it. Wonderful feeling when you can eat a meal and be going "A-HA!, so that's how they do it". Like watching slowed-down high-speed movies of Django's fingers.
As for your prominent navel, don't sweat it. Only your wife's opinion and your cardiologist's opinion matter. Well, maybe your tailor's too, but less often so. :wink:
Nice post. Even engineers wax philosophical now and then.
Guys, guys - excellent!
It´s been a long time since I read something this eloquent and well thought-out on the net, let alone in a hobbyists forum! :shock:
Keep it up!
Cheers /Richard (who doesn´t know how to spell Nietzsche but cares about the odd philosophical thought now and then)
Well,..........when it comes right down to it.....the only thing that really matters is............GOOD HYGIENE.
Keep it clean
RDV
yeah, Richard...
That's one of the reasons some of us keep coming back.
In addition to having real EEs Diystomp has it's own homegrown versions of Robert Pirsig and Marshall McLuhan.
Find that over at the Gearpage or 18watt.
A great deal of that expert ability boils down to recognizing patterns. Circuits, as well as chess scenarios, tend to fall into classic, well-documented archetypes and strategies. The time spent studying these patterns frees one from the tedium and confusion of seeing too many variables at once; one gains the ability to see bigger pictures and intuit situations without much effort. The same applies to music with regard to learning scales, chords, and theory: practice and study pay off. The good news is that the training doesn't have to be formal. I feel like I've gotten a college education over the past few years hanging around forums with R.G. and Hammer, so thanks, gentlemen.
Its like RG said, takes time to Develope a Nose and set of ears that can learn by listening and seeing, not just Babbling crap out of book, one of the best stated and nun anytrue'er things can you read my friend, Thanks RG for those Nice word's you just Spoke,
Not to forget Mark also, Thank you for Elaborating.
JD
Someone I once knew when I first started in consulting engineering said that "an expert is not one who knows all the answers, but rather, one who knows where to look to get the answer." I always thought that was pretty true.
Some of the most knowledgeable people I have known had no formal training in the areas that they were experts in. I am mostly self-taught in most areas of my life, including my professional one. What makes me unsure about myself sometimes is that I am not sure if what I am teaching myself is right or not. Time is the judge of that... 8)
:D
Paul, as long as your happy, thats all that really counts anyway !
JD
Fantastic reads. :D I couldn't agree more.
I think my big advantage was to realize what expert really meant before many of my classmates. I may be a graduate of the school of hard knocks, but I'm an expert in ignoring that stuff that doesn't count and lots of people mistake that for increased aptitude. Others are too busy focusing on the stuff that doesn't count and they think my worker-drone skills need improving. :o I would much rather be mountain biking. :mrgreen:
"Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted."
-- Albert Einstein
Take care,
-Peter
Yeah JD, that is true. It gets old at work, though, when most everyone has degrees and you don't, so you are viewed by some as not being equal even though you can outperform many of these college grads from good colleges in many aspects. :evil:
But the people at the top, (the principals and owners) recognize me differently, so I am actually teaching college grads how to do design and stuff. It's just kind of a weird position to be in - being recognized as an expert in something but not having any other credentials than being self-taught and 15 years of experience. I have never been one to do things they way everyone else does them. I guess that "non-conformist" label I was given long ago has held itself to be true...
A common thread here seems to be "don't sweat the details". I have noticed a lot of newbies in my field got so bogged down in the details that the job wnet over budget, was late, etc. Really good advice. The details are important, but knowing which ones are the most important are key here.
Quote from: Peter Snowberg
"Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted."
-- Albert Einstein
Take care,
-Peter
Peter, do you mind if I borrow your Einstein quote? :D
Quote from: Arno van der HeijdenPeter, do you mind if I borrow your Einstein quote? :D
I stole it from Albert and I don't think he would object. ;)
http://www.quotedb.com/authors/albert-einstein
Take care,
-Peter
Quote from: R.G.It occurs to me....Yeah, yeah, I can hear you thinking "R.G.'s gone off the deep end comtemplating his too-prominent navel." Probably so. ...
No definitely not. I hear you loud and clear on this one. I can draw a parallel within my own job as a software engineer. I constantly get irritated with examples of sub-standard code design (not to mention untidy/inconsistent layout and commenting), but its not so much the standard of workmanship which rubs the wrong way, its more my inability to put across how I would tackle things. Some engineering principles are quite hard to put across in a way in which the recipient suddenly yells "Yep - I've got it!" Usually, when I'm on a roll about something or other which has got me excited enough to bring it up at our morning get together, I get blank looks and I can hear them thinking "Dave's off again!" This is a source of real frustration. Often it's hard to think of examples of why doing something "this" way (albeit expedient) will result in a boot up the backside 6 or 12 months down the line - it's particularly difficult with Software because of the sheer man hours involved and the difficulty in reversing what appear to be quite trivial technical decisions made some months earlier. Does anyone else share this sort of experience?
Quote from: R.G.It occurs to me that something that I know and use all the time is not something I've seen expressed within the electronics realm, and especially for very beginning beginners in electronics, so I thought I'd get it down explicitly here.
(1) Some things matter, some things don't.
(2) Knowing *which* things matter and which don't is crucial to success.
(3) If you don't know which things matter, your success is tied to incredibly tedious attention to every detail.
(4) Elegance and excellence in design depends on forcing some things not to matter.
Beginners are taught to follow instructions to the letter to achieve any success. This is in fact critical, because beginners don't have the base of knowledge that lets them separate things that matter from things that don't at a glance, almost unconsciously.
When I was a beginner, it was almost infuriating to me to hear an elder say "...yeah, that's different, but it doesn't matter here..." because I had set up the idea that everything mattered. And it did to me, because I had not yet learned to separate them for myself.
Knowing how to separate them is only done by intimate knowledge and experience. Every time an elder said that infuriating line, I got a little clearer picture, because it uncovered another subtle part of things that I hadn't thought of before. Over time, they added up.
That the "matter-ing-ness" of things can be influenced is another idea that took a while to sink in. Good designers can force things to matter or not matter. In complex designs where everything matters, the design is fragile and rigid. Any change in anything causes it to not work right. In designs where you can whop in any old part any have it work, the original designer took some pains to force the matteringness into only those things that were critical. Case in point: transistor biasing; good transistor bias design is tolerant of power supply variation, temperature extremes, and transistor characteristics to the point where it will do something almost right if the parts values are even close and almost any old transistor will do.
Yeah, yeah, I can hear you thinking "R.G.'s gone off the deep end comtemplating his too-prominent navel." Probably so.
I have this other theory that any possible situation has a C&W song already written about. In this case it's "The Gambler". You know - you gotta know when to hold 'em...
No shit! This is great... You're right. I have become very adept at numerous skills over the years and your theory applies to every one of them. As a newbie builder I get very frustrated at times not having that knowledge base developed.
RG - like many simple truths, I could have come up with your points 1 to 3 if I'd thought about it. But point 4 - that's REAL insight. Well elucidated.
All the time, pal, all the time!
A fellow bit-slinger since 1983.
Hello All!
Have been out of town for the last two weeks (without internet access) :(
Tracking through the forum, I came upon this thread and realized why I stay! You guys are ALL beauty and brains 8) Four and five dimensional thinking, (that outside, through, and what defines "the box" thinking) is not the the conceptive thought process of the "average bear". Kudos to R.G. and Mark Hammer for capsulizing something that I have "known and know that I know" into a viable and active description of why those of us "non-papered" folks can transcend the norm...we think 8)
Beautiful concepts!
Tony
QuoteSomeone I once knew when I first started in consulting engineering said that "an expert is not one who knows all the answers, but rather, one who knows where to look to get the answer." I always thought that was pretty true.
That is something that rings true for me too.
I'm a researcher who is that classic kind of expert - one who knows where to look for solutions. But I work in an industry (agriculture) where most people (nearly 90%) like to keep checking everything. Give people like that a schematic and they CAN'T reduce it down to a few general sections, and work out the most critical. But they never miss anything, either. They are good for quality control. These kind of differences are represented in personality tests like the Myers-Briggs test, or my personal favourite, the Kiersey temperament sorter (Kiersey has a great book - "Please understand me").
One of the key differences in temperament is whether you are an INTUITIVE type, who quickly learns the skills to work subconsciously and handle concepts, or a SENSING type, who quickly learns to keep watch over everything. Intuitive types make good scientists, while sensing types make good bus drivers and policemen. Interestingly, about 80% of people are sensing types, and only 20% intuitive. That shocks scientists and engineers, who often think that everyone thinks like they do. But it's great, really. I am so "off with the fairies" in my little intuitive world that I wouldn't be happy or safe driving the school bus. I can do their science and they can run the mechanics of the world.
Apologies for the long post, but this stuff fascinates me.
8^)
I thought it was:
to crush your enemies
see them driven before you
and hear the lamentation of their women
:D
travis
I hate to cut against the grain of all this but I've got to admit to to a disagreement here.
I consider the whole idea of intuition
(which I take to mean understanding the world around me without any reference to my sense perceptions or without access to specialized training which I trust has dealt with that real world even though I might not have)
pure priestcraft suitable only for mystics and their devotees.
QuoteKnowing how to separate them is only done by intimate knowledge and experience. Every time an elder said that infuriating line, I got a little clearer picture, because it uncovered another subtle part of things that I hadn't thought of before. Over time, they added up.
This statement is the key to determining and applying the concept of "matteringness".
Without it (intimate knowledge and experience) what does or doesn't matter is simply unknown.
There is nothing intuitive in the slightest about this process of knowing and experiencing the world of electronics we all seem to love so much. Common sense knowledge plays almost no part here. Extensive and intensive amounts of work go into getting the formal and specialized knowledge you need to deal with this stuff.
This statement might rub some the wrong way. You EE guys might say "I've gotten to the point where I can intuitively see that it won't work because..." or "Common sense says that if you hook it up like that it'll fail...". Again I say, with all due respect, this is a point you've reached which is neither intuitive nor commonly known. It's something you've had to bump your head up against before a certain level of understanding and proficiency sets in. Indeed, many of you have spent YEARS getting to that point that you, oddly, describe as intuitive. Let me sit you down in a chair, put a headset on you, key up 8 different discrete frequencies and unleash the Friday night 6:00 rush at LAX airport under IFR conditions and you've got aircraft backed up to the Grand Canyon, San Francisco, Hawaii and Mexico for the next 4 hours. Tell me how you feel when I smugly look at you and say "Can't you see it?"
Intuition and "common sense" will quickly get you in a disaster. Steady, methodical, consistent and thorough training in the fundamentals HAS to be emphasized and accomplished. Comon sense accounts for nothing. Special senses are needed which don't come naturally. They have to be placed there intentionally; with a purpose. This seems almost too obvious a statement to even mention and I'd probably be embarrassed saying it if was in a context other than this discussion.
You "tsk..tsk" and "sigh" as you watch us, "the very beginning beginners", bump our heads against the tree while you walk with ease through the forest.
"No Clay. Back up, turn left, take 2 steps forward, turn right, walk...sigh"
That's cool...that's just the lumps you have to take when you start something new. And especially when you undertake something with the breadth and beauty of the "mysterious" universe of electrons. You see, it IS mysterious to me...still. Probably always will be. It's a fascinating mystery and a perplexing mystery to me...at my level. I'm not so much into pedals or amps or musical whatnot. For me that's just the medium...the backdrop for learning about electronics (and honestly, I'm fascinated by what you'd probably consider the minutiae of electronics...the irrelevant). Anyway, it's a backdrop I prefer because of it's low cost and functionality but nevertheless it's still just a backdrop. I've also grown to dig this site alot. It combines the best of both worlds. I hated the internet until this site.
But anyway...
when you see me, on my knees with my head firmly bumped up against that tree remember this...maybe I'm not that stuck at all. Maybe I'm just really, really looking closely at something I've never seen before...something beautiful down in the weeds.
I'm not going to drop my 2 cents here for it may just simply ruined the beauty af points of views expressed here. I'm just amused with what I found out in the chorus of one famous Metallica song, "Nothing Else Matters".
Quote from: James HetfieldAnd nothing else matters...
Never care for what they say
Never care for games they play
(I) Never care for what they do
(I) Never care for what they know...
And I know
Is there something there :roll: ? Could someone relate the lyrics to the discussion here? :roll:
Quote from: brettOne of the key differences in temperament is whether you are an INTUITIVE type, who quickly learns the skills to work subconsciously and handle concepts, or a SENSING type, who quickly learns to keep watch over everything. Intuitive types make good scientists, while sensing types make good bus drivers and policemen. Interestingly, about 80% of people are sensing types, and only 20% intuitive.
As a result of having a partner who studied psychology, I've read a fair bit of her library over the years including a lot on type (Jung, Myers-Brigg etc). I had to pick you up on the above Brett as your comments are a little sweeping. Many people have BOTH intuition and sensing skills, but simply prefer one over the other. How developed each is depends upon what your dominant is. If you have a Thinking or Feeling dominant, then there is plenty of scope for developing both sensing AND intuition skills (though you will still have a preference for one over the other).
Being a Sensor myself (ISTP) I thought I'd better stick up for a few other 'bus driver' types. Saw that Charles Darwin driving the No 37 the other week...strange geezer! :D
PS The percentage of Sensors to Intuitives varies from country to country.
CSJ:
I think this is really just a semantic issue. I am sure that by "intuition" RG doesn't mean anything like hocus pocus, or even what is thought of as common sense. What I believe was intended was nothing more than a network of neural shortcuts--where your brain, because it has well and truly assimilated the knowledge involved, can simply work through parts of a problem, or at least point you in the right direction, without any conscious thought of the steps involved. It is unconscious, but it is not mystical or mysterious. Anyone who has mastered some area or other experiences this, and can generally work more efficiently as a result.
Ben
I'm going to be bossy here, and impose my will as a trained psychologist (3 degrees and over 30 years in the field is probably enough to qualify) and enemy of "pap psychology".
The Myers-Briggs stuff seems to live on like Freudian and Reichian psychology amongst a small insular group of people, mostly in educational psych, human resource management, and counselling, while the rest of mainstream psychology looks at it and goes "Huh?". It has little utility except for those who make money off peddling it to others who don't know any better. That's an extremely harsh and biased view, but not at all far off the mark. Still, its omnipresence convinces many as does the sort of face-valid story it seems to tell about people. I understand why many get sucked in.
The fact is that EVERYONE is intuitive and sensing. The extent to which they appeal to conscious declarative knowledge is far more a function of their familiarity and practice with the task than of temperament or personality (which are 2 different things). Learning "style" is always, always, always, a function of the background knowledge that people bring to content, and what their learning/performance goals are. Everyone uses every style, depending on circumstance.
As far what gets called "intuition", very few people, with the exception of those speaking a second language they are shaky at, or aphasics in rehab, have to *think* about either planning out the grammar of their sentences or decoding the grammar of others' language most of the time. It just "happens", and although it would seem to be intuitive, it is based on thousands and thousands of hours of practice. So much practice that when people suffer neurological trauma/damage, language is often one of the last things to go even though they may be seriously cognitively impaired otherwise. It's so engrained from practice that they can do it even without thinking or being able to "have" a thought. Same goes for knowing how to walk. Alzheimers patients wander off lost based on their "intuition" about walking despite being unable to organize a conscious thought.
Similarly, few of us have to think about how to sit up straight or chew our food. We make largely unconscious "micro-decisions", based on extensive experience, about all of these things such that our attention can be devoted to the many other dozens of concurrent tasks we are always doing (like typing out this reply for instance, while trying to listen to an interesting interview on the radio, and muttering "Yeah, fine" to a child who wants your attention). Indeed, the demands on our attention are such that all of us have a huge urge to automatize as much of what we do as we can, just to free up precious conscious attention for other things.
What many call "intuition" is, in fact, the result of a great deal of "tuition", which can be explicit (i.e., taught, read, told, etc) OR implicit (i.e., learned incidentally without awareness). Arguably, very little of all that we know really is explicitly learned. Those things we are aware of learning are just the tip of a huge knowledge iceberg. Underneath the iceberg are things like how to stand up, how to keep piss in your bladder, how to talk, how to chew, how to gesture, how to move your fingers from chord position A to B, how to do finger vibrato, how to swing a tennis racket, and how to see the difference between a circle and square. As we gain experience with any task, there is a gradual change in our knowledge from conscious declarative knowledge to unconscious procedural knowledge, the latter being something that is hard for people to articulate, describe, or be aware of.
Knowing how to do finger vibrato is a good example and relevant to many here. When you were starting out, people could say "Do this", or maybe you would try something new, listen to whether it sounded Kossoff-ish or Trower-ish enough for your liking, and try again. Now, though, you just do it, and aren't really aware that you are doing it or drawing on your knowledge of that skill to do it. If a beginner asked you "How'd you do that?" you'd more than likely answer "Do what?" or "I don't know".
The "intuition" that RG speaks of is, in fact, expertise. The state of expertise in which the expert uses highly proceduralized knowledge about circuit behaviour to jump more quickly to the answer, or at least a reduced set of possible answers, to a given question. This is no different than how a master chef tastes and says "Needs more tamarind", how a skilled auto mechanic listens and says "Sounds like a gasket", how a radiologist looks and says "That could be a tumour", or how a skilled coach decides that backup quarterback X could benefit by running a few plays now. Given time and effort, they might be able to tell you roughly how they got to those inferences, but they were most certainly not aware of what they were doing or how they did WHEN they did it.
What we call "common sense" is another kind of expertise about human affairs that embodies rules of practicality, rules of expectations about others, rules of morality or socially appropriate behaviour, and rules drawn from culture. There is a LOT of training involved in creating common sense right from the cradle, and few of us are aware we are appealing to all this training when we use it. Some folks may well appear to lack "common sense" but my sense is that such individuals more often have a common sense that is well-trained and used but simply incorrect and the product of what they were surrounded with from early on.
In some cases, temperament, particularly impulsiveness, can lead people to overlook or underuse that which they do know and could use unconsciously in a "common sense" manner. Of course teens are most susceptible to that, but some folks have a lifelong hurdle to manage in terms of being so propelled by their emotions and impulses that all the common sense they might have sits unused. I feel for them. They may act too fast to use the knowledge they have, but they never get to skip the part where they kick themselves in the ass for the screwups they did.
If learning more about expertise and skill acquisition piques your interest. John Anderson is probably your man.
Enough pedantics for the night. The Ottawa Renegades (my home team) are presently engaged in shaming the Edmonton Eskimos and I'm going to go watch Josh Ranek carry the ball for another hundred yards. How I'm going to walk from my office to the couch, I don't know. :wink:
As my Jr. Highschool History teacher Ms. Bailey told us, "the more you know, the more your realize you don't know."
Anymore, I realize I can't philosophize may way out of a paper bag. Actually about the only thing I'll be getting out of the bag with MAYBE is playing guitar and realizing that my children matter more than anything else in my life.
I thought it was:
to crush your enemies
see them driven before you
and hear the lamentation of their women
I like, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." and I added, or leaves us maimed.
You guys are tooooo coooool. 8)
Hi again. Oh boy, there's some deep knowledge around on this. I thought I was bringing clarity when I used stereotypes of intuitive and sensing "types". I didn't mean to paint the people of the world as "this type" or "that". :oops: Of course there's more than the 16 M-B "types" in the world.
But DO I find a certain robust basis for the types. My work attracts different personality types (researchers of INTJ and farmers of XSTJ) to the type that I am (ENFP). To aid communication, I find that some categorisation helps, and for me, the M-B system works ok. To a psychologist it looks simplistic and full of holes, but that doesn't stop it being a useful tool for me (in the same way we might still use a 741 op-amp).
Just to add some extra confusion:- It has been thought that decision-making and intuition comes from a combination of memory and logical processing. It turns out that memory is anatomically and functionally separate from decision-making. Decision-making is tied instead to emotion. So that old expression of having good "gut feel" for problems is apt. Emotions may be better aids to the intuitive decision-making that RG talks about than memory and experience. :shock: Neurobiology is sooo strange.
Quote from: brettTo aid communication, I find that some categorisation helps, and for me, the M-B system works ok. To a psychologist it looks simplistic and full of holes, but that doesn't stop it being a useful tool for me
Ditto! :)
"One of the key differences in temperament is whether you are an INTUITIVE type, who quickly learns the skills to work subconsciously and handle concepts, or a SENSING type, who quickly learns to keep watch over everything. Intuitive types make good scientists, while sensing types make good bus drivers and policemen."
I'll agree with Mr. Hammer's statement about intuition. I am a very intuitive thinker, but my thought process revolves almost totally around my past experiences and what I learned from them more than just some whim that "this must be so because that's what my intuition tells me". All I know is that academic prowess many times does not pair up with being a great designer in my world (consulting engineering). In my world, you have "the engineer type" and "the nuts and bolts" type. It's kind of rare when one excels at both. I know the sensing type, those are the guys who micro-manage every tiny detail and make Mt. Everest out of a Pharoah Ant hill. These are the ones who drive me crazy, like half of the plans checkers that I deal with. Some of them are so incredibly anal about things that really have no bearing on anything in the grand scheme of things that I often wish that I had a punching bag in the corner of my cubicle! I could go into great detail on that, but I'll spare y'all... :wink:
This thread gives me a headache.
I think I can take a big chunk of blame for your migraine,so I'll take responsibility for making it go away.
Brother Keen had two main points. The first basic point is that really *good* designs don't saddle you with the need to build in all sort of tweaking features for "coping" with varying conditions. A great design makes varying conditions "not matter" moreso than a merely good design will.
The second point is that design should aim for attending to those things that DO matter, whether in terms of control/performance/usability features, or in terms of what it tries to make irrelevant as a necessary condition of operation.
Case in point. Reviews of the early Joe Meek compressors noted that there wasn't a helluva lot of adjustments you could make but that every tweak of the controls provided resulted in meaningful change to sound, and that there were few settings where you *couldn't* get a decent sound. THAT is a design that addresses what matters, and makes other things NOT matter.