[ldd]

The first sentence in the first slice opens as follows: "I have always found it important to actually understand the things I am using."

I think there is a certain 'magic' in not understanding certain concepts fully. It's probably why I like maths and heavily dislike physics and chemistry. I do not want to make sense of this world. I want to see "the volume of a sphere is 4/3PIr^3" and in some sense see it as an incantation that one would make when casting magic in an RPG. Once you take some calculus, it is a pretty easy formula to derive (integrate?), but there is an allure, an invitation to do some really interesting math just for itself. It fires up our inner curiosity, if you want.

So anyways, I am neither addressing the title's question nor would I really mind if quaternions were replaced in game engines, but I thought it was important to voice the opinion that sometimes it's ok to not understand something.

[Jensson]

> I think there is a certain 'magic' in not understanding certain concepts fully. It's probably why I like maths and heavily dislike physics and chemistry.

This doesn't make sense to me. Math are things that humans can understand fully, physics and chemistry are not, at least not yet. Things like "the volume of a sphere is 4/3PIr^3" can be fully understood, there are many ways to derive that formula. Of course you can apply it without understanding it, but the same goes for newtons equations or any of the many other formulas you have in physics and chemistry.

[kingcharles]

I agree. You can't know everything. When the 3D world moved to Quaternions I just plugged in the functions and accepted the fact that my maths wasn't good enough to really understand what was going on under the hood and I concentrated my abilities on building the rest of the engine, which was something I did understand.

Most people who drive cars have no idea how a combustion engine works, but the world doesn't completely descend into anarchy because of this.

[jazzyjackson]

I found mathematics much more approachable after being convinced it was not important to understand “why” - that I would spend all my time trying to understand that which is not necessarily understandable.

its like wondering how a hammer works instead of just using the hammer

[Izkata]

Funny you should choose that particular example, that's the one formula I could never remember in gradeschool until on a whim while bored at my part-time job I used what I'd just learned in calculus to derive it (yep, with integration). Once I understood where each part of the formula came from, I never forgot it again.

[undershirt]

> I have always found it important to actually understand the things I am using.

> I think there is a certain 'magic' in not understanding certain concepts fully.

With magic everywhere I wonder how many lifetimes it would take to understand the things we use. And I wonder how much of our knowledge is, should, or must remain tacit[1].

And sometimes “surface explanations” kick off deep understandings that you can’t surface at once, or ever. Jordan Peterson tried rationalizing faith in this way, and it was quite a show[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

[2] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I3lUr...