Comment by petsfed
8 hours ago
Back when I was "playing" (in the dismissive sense) at being physicist and physics teacher, what I found was that the secret to actually understanding something was being free to fiddle with the parameters of the thing to try to dive a preferred outcome. That's more or less the mission statement of Bell Labs in its heyday.
I don't understand how you can exist in this space (that is, Hackernews and the larger startup culture) while being dismissive of folks out there exploring their particular parameter spaces, outside of practical constraints.
I think it is generally fine to consider the things we do playing with stuff—I consider myself very lucky to enjoy playing with computers as they’ll let you have careers in that.
But, for example, if I say that this site is a bunch of people playing at being engineers, in most contexts (maybe other than this thread) I’d expect to get some pretty annoyed responses.
Firstly, because there’s a difference between saying we’re playing with a problem, and saying we’re playing at being something.
Secondly, because it is great to be self-effacing, but less so to be others-effacing.