Well, F = ma.
Three or four very short stories on the difficulty of learning to use simple things. Depends whether you count the last section as a story.
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When I was taking freshman physics and we were stuck on a problem, the professor would say "Well, F = ma."
True, but absolutely useless. Yes, we know that F = ma. (Force equals mass times acceleration.) Nobody thought "Oh, that's it. I was thinking F = ma2. That explains everything." Newton's laws are simple (in a sense) but subtle to apply. The difficult part isn't the abstract principles but their application to concrete problems.
* * *
The heart of Bayesian statistics is not much more complicated than F = ma. Its the statement that
posterior a likelihood i- prior.
It takes a few years to learn how to apply that equation well. And when people try to help, their advice sounds about as useless as "Well, F = ma."
* * *
Learning to use Unix was hard. When I asked for help getting started, a lab assistant said "Go read the man pages." That's about as hostile as saying "Want to learn English? Read a dictionary." Fortunately I knew other people who were helpful. One of them told me about the book.
But still, it took a while to get the gestalt of Unix. I knew how to use a handful of utilities, and kept thinking everything would be fine once I knew maybe 10x as many utilities. Then one day I was talking with a friend who seemed fluent working with Unix. I asked him how he did a few things and realized he used the same tools I did, but used them better. It was almost as if he'd said "I just use F = ma" except when he said it things clicked.
* * *
The motivation for this post, the thing that brought these stories to mind, was listening to a podcast. The show had some good advice, things that I know I need to do, but nothing I hadn't heard many times before. The hard part is working out what the particulars mean for me personally.
It often takes someone else to help us see what's right in front of us. I'm grateful for the people who have helped me work out the particulars of things I was convinced of but couldn't see how to apply. Sometimes I have the pleasure of being able to do that for someone else.