I tried this in part, and I think I’ll try it more completely next time I’m on a plane or in some other liminal sort of waiting space with cycles to spare.
I noticed that in exercise 3, the strategies which I’d rejected were primarily destructive. I happened to observe a pen, and while I did take the cap off to look at both the cap and the body in exercise 1, I didn’t disassemble the body (it’s friction-fit together so disassembly would potentially destroy it, mar the plastic, etc). The main unused techniques on my list for determining the properties of the materials it was made from would harm the materials: Bite it, scratch it, try to bend it, try to mark it with things to see what sticks, expose it to heat to see what it does, etc.
I happen to sew and draft my own clothing patterns, and there’s a parallel here to how one might take the pattern from a garment. You can kind of, sort of copy the pattern with the garment intact, but to get a really deep understanding of how it’s put together, one of the best things to do is take it apart seam by seam. The details of which seams are enclosed within which other seams reveals information about the order in which the garment was put together that would otherwise be hidden. Destroying the seams holding a lining to the garment can be the only way to expose what interfacing and construction techniques were used in the outer layers, and so forth.
After disassembly, the pile of cloth pieces and knowledge is different from the garment it started as. If I’d fully disassembled my pen, the puddle of ink and pile of metal and plastic bits would meaningfully differ from the original pen, although the disassembly would have yielded information that I couldn’t get without it.
I feel cautious of performing this kind of disassembly on concepts that I like and want more of, lest I invite the “love isn’t real, it’s just a bunch of chemical reactions” type of philosophical failure mode. There’s almost certainly a set of guard rails to abstract disassembly, just as there is to concrete disassembly. With a concrete item, I know intuitively which operations are reversible and which are not—I know I can take the cap off the pen and put the cap back on and it’ll still be the same pen, whereas if I dump all the ink out and disassemble the ball point nib, it’ll become a meaningfully different thing, a formerly useful pen.
This intuition about physical objects comes from having broken some throughout my life, and having had to replace them. Do others feel an intuition for where to stop in disassembling abstract concepts? Do you have theories on how you developed that intuition?
I tried this in part, and I think I’ll try it more completely next time I’m on a plane or in some other liminal sort of waiting space with cycles to spare.
I noticed that in exercise 3, the strategies which I’d rejected were primarily destructive. I happened to observe a pen, and while I did take the cap off to look at both the cap and the body in exercise 1, I didn’t disassemble the body (it’s friction-fit together so disassembly would potentially destroy it, mar the plastic, etc). The main unused techniques on my list for determining the properties of the materials it was made from would harm the materials: Bite it, scratch it, try to bend it, try to mark it with things to see what sticks, expose it to heat to see what it does, etc.
I happen to sew and draft my own clothing patterns, and there’s a parallel here to how one might take the pattern from a garment. You can kind of, sort of copy the pattern with the garment intact, but to get a really deep understanding of how it’s put together, one of the best things to do is take it apart seam by seam. The details of which seams are enclosed within which other seams reveals information about the order in which the garment was put together that would otherwise be hidden. Destroying the seams holding a lining to the garment can be the only way to expose what interfacing and construction techniques were used in the outer layers, and so forth.
After disassembly, the pile of cloth pieces and knowledge is different from the garment it started as. If I’d fully disassembled my pen, the puddle of ink and pile of metal and plastic bits would meaningfully differ from the original pen, although the disassembly would have yielded information that I couldn’t get without it.
I feel cautious of performing this kind of disassembly on concepts that I like and want more of, lest I invite the “love isn’t real, it’s just a bunch of chemical reactions” type of philosophical failure mode. There’s almost certainly a set of guard rails to abstract disassembly, just as there is to concrete disassembly. With a concrete item, I know intuitively which operations are reversible and which are not—I know I can take the cap off the pen and put the cap back on and it’ll still be the same pen, whereas if I dump all the ink out and disassemble the ball point nib, it’ll become a meaningfully different thing, a formerly useful pen.
This intuition about physical objects comes from having broken some throughout my life, and having had to replace them. Do others feel an intuition for where to stop in disassembling abstract concepts? Do you have theories on how you developed that intuition?