Beginning artists just draw stuff without thinking about it.<p>In art school, they get taught how to do what we call "construction" - how to think of things as three-dimensional objects rendered onto a flat plane. Their process becomes full of boxes and cylinders and perspective guides.<p>Grizzled pros just draw stuff without thinking. Because they've done the construction so damn much it happens beneath the level of consciousness. I only need to construct every now and then, for tough, rare angles. Someday I won't have to do that any more either.<p>I'm not really sure I'd call it "the same place". It looks like it from the outside, but I'd describe it as more like a full turn around a spiral staircase.
I studied the martial arts (Cha Yon Ryu = "natural way") for many years. Our instructor quoted T.S. Eliot to us:<p>"And the end of all our exploring - Will be to arrive where we started - And know the place for the first time."
To me, this is mostly about the way we learn as beginners.<p>You start as a beginner by reading books, watching experts, taking a class. Even if you start by jumping in and figuring it out, you still get the notion of how you should do it from somewhere. Because there is too much theory to understand at first (be it music, computing or math), you accept dogmas, or theorems or theories and work with them.<p>Eventually you gain enough confidence to reconsider what you have been taught. When you do come full circle, I think it's mostly because you understand why something is taught the way it is, not necessarily because you were instinctively doing it right at first.
Very true for me. Computers were a tool to build programs. Then I spent time researching programming languages and making frameworks (in summary: building abstractions). Now I'm back to building non-abstract things again. I wonder if it's going to repeat itself or if it'll stay this way.
Luke: Obi-Wan? Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father.<p>Obi-Wan: Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view.<p>Luke: "A certain point of view"?<p>Obi-Wan: Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.<p>--<p>Perspective is infinite -- only the omniscient see its entirety. But we often believe that our perspective is the way things are. The whole truth.<p>Humility is the key to not being limited by what we think we know. "We can't learn to see until we realize we are blind." -- Alan Kay.
This reminds me of one of my favorite philosophies on learning, the four stages of competence:<p>Unconscious incompetence -> Conscious incompetence -> Conscious competence -> Unconscious competence<p><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence</a> </i>
Note one of the comments to the article at the bottom quotes Kurt Vonnegut:<p>"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
<a href="http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/3786" rel="nofollow">http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/3786</a>
I liked the quote on music. Sheet music is good, but as any video can tell you, you can't just <i>play</i> it and expect it to sound good...<p>"Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play at all. Then they learn to read music. Eventually, maybe years later, they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see."
This link seems to be littered already throughout HN comments, but this article really reminded me of it:
<a href="http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html</a><p>The remark on Dirac delta functions resonated with me, although I feel as if I have actually go through several cycles of enlightenment and ignorance. Actually, I get this feeling for most topics in analysis in general.
This seems to relate quite closely with the Hype Cycle: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle</a>
In any hierarchy, an individual will rise to his or her own level of incompetence, then remain there.
<a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_Principle" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_Princip...</a>