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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

> That's what school is for.

It's not.

We have advanced CNC mills and lathes, and apprentices still learn doing things manually to understand how the tools work, their failure modes, and more.

There are machines that mix drinks, but you still learn to bartend by doing it manually and making mistakes, not starting out with machines.

Same with writing. Same with software. Doing the "simple", automatable thing is how you learn how the system works.

School can't be the same. Plenty of people have tried, but being effective in the real world is different.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

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> There are machines that mix drinks, but you still learn to bartend by doing it manually and making mistakes, not starting out with machines.

You could say the same about grilling burgers. And yet, there are millions of burger cooks around the world grilling hundreds of millions of patties everyday with zero knowledge of how to grill burgers, at McDonald's and other bottom of the barrel fast food chains.

If not for the social aspect of being asked what you want for a drink and then watching it being made, bartenders would've already been replaced by mixer kiosks by now.

> You could say the same about grilling burgers. And yet, there are millions of burger cooks around the world grilling hundreds of millions of patties everyday with zero knowledge of how to grill burgers, at McDonald's and other bottom of the barrel fast food chains.

If there are cooks successfully grilling burgers, I think they would have to have knowledge of how to grill burgers.

It was literally pressing one button. A double sided grill closed, 40 seconds later it opened back up and 8 perfectly cooked patties are ready. That was 15 years ago in eastern Europe, they've replaced it with an even more automated process at least once since.

The "clamshell" grill was introduced at McDonald's in the 1980s. Prior to that you cooked the burgers on a flat grill, it was still all by timer but you had to sear-press and turn the burgers by hand. Still a very defined process with almost no need for judgement.

  > In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

This is such beautiful rhetoric.

It's not mine originally, but it's been attributed to so many people that I don't know who to credit.

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