Ask HN: What was an idea or concept that made sense to you only after a small epiphany?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157983

by clueless • 18 years ago

3 3 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What I mean is for example an economic or mathematical concept which you struggled to grasp until one day you figured out something by yourself which was not thought or written about when discussing that subject.

What was that concept and what was the epiphany that made it all make sense?

davidw• 18 years ago

Comparative advantage makes more intuitive sense when someone gives you the example of the young strong guy and the old slow guy trapped on an island.

craig-faber• 18 years ago

This one's actually a discovery. I was psychology major in college and had been reading about research on gender differences in language. People seemd to intuit that there was something behind the stereotypes about women talking more, and a difference did show up in brain imaging - men process language in areas one hemisphere, usually the left, women did some secondary processing in corresponding areas of the non-dominant hemisphere. Feminists had written about this too. But over and over word counts, comprehension tests, vocabulary tests had found nothing.

One day, I was at a small party that had started to break up. The remaining guys were in one room, and the two girls had drifted to the kitchen and were chatting excitedly about something. I had gotten bored with what the guys were talking about, and wondered what the girls were so excited about. But I couldn't understand them because they were talking on top of each other. Then it hit me: They can understand each other! Women can talk and understand simultaneously, we can't. They can use the secondary areas in the non-dominant hemisphere as back-up language comprehension areas. Men just use areas in one hemisphere so we have to switch back and forth between speaking and listening, we can't do both at the same time. It's blatantly obvious if you stop to think about it, but in all the research i'd been reading, nobody had stopped to think about it.

The feminist take on language and gender made sense too. If you assume that men could listen and talk at the same time if they wanted to, comments that guys make, like "Hey, shut up a minuit would you, I want to say something" and "Hey wait a minuit, I'm still talking" do seem domineering.

thorax• 18 years ago

AP Calculus. The epiphany was "I have a very bad teacher and this is really easy stuff. The rest of the class will fail because they didn't realize this earlier. :( :( "

Linear Algebra. The epiphany is difficult to explain and remember. It involved the elegance and coolness of eigenvectors.

How damned important and awesome physics is to life. The epiphany came after actually predicting precisely how a projectile would fall and where it would hit when launched. My only thought was "Oh my god, why didn't they tell me I could predict the future long before I got sucked into CompSci? I would be a physics major had they shown me this stuff earlier. Why isn't teaching better? How many other people never discover this and abandon interest?"

Why people tried hard at all in school. Epiphany: "Because people really do reward you for excellence after school. Even if doing well in school feels like you're being penalized and singled-out, all those other people will be slacking off after school while you're naturally being successful."

Ask HN: What was an idea or concept that made sense to you only after a small epiphany?

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