> This may involve some amount of over-simplification (which should be indicated if present) and will undoubtedly leave out a tremendous amount of detail, but the conceptual essence should be there.
I think the disagreement hinges on whether you believe the snippets from the GP post e.g. the "rods and cones" or caffeine examples are fundamentally valuable or not.
> There are fields where nobody can really do this. These are fields that nobody truly understands yet.
Curious what you would consider an example of such a field?
It's a good book, and I enjoyed reading it. But over subsequent years I've had growing doubts over the true value of the "understanding" that it provided.
> Curious what you would consider an example of such a field?
The frontiers of physics always strike me this way. The names and explanations are incredibly strained and bizarre. This is probably the canonical example and is perhaps why The Elegant Universe doesn't quite achieve what it sets out to achieve.
Another one from my own academic past is "complexity theory" where hand-wavey concepts like "emergency" or "higher order causation" get thrown around with a lot of confusion. We can clearly see there's some "there" here, but I don't think we really understand what it all means yet. Put stuff together, interesting higher-order stuff happens, and so now let's create a combinatorial explosion of jargon around it. Publish or perish.
Finally "consciousness studies" or anything else semi-fringe probably counts. Again there's certainly some "there" there, but we don't even know the right questions to ask. Something is happening to matter that makes it wonder what's happening to it.
I think the disagreement hinges on whether you believe the snippets from the GP post e.g. the "rods and cones" or caffeine examples are fundamentally valuable or not.
> There are fields where nobody can really do this. These are fields that nobody truly understands yet.
Curious what you would consider an example of such a field?
FWIW my anecdotal example of what I think the GP is complaining about... I read "The Elegant Universe": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elegant_Universe
It's a good book, and I enjoyed reading it. But over subsequent years I've had growing doubts over the true value of the "understanding" that it provided.