You can get better at something without understanding why, but you should be able to think about it and determine why fairly easily.

This is something everyone who cares about improving in a skill does regularly - examine their improvement, the reasons behind it, and how to add to them. That’s the basis of self-driven learning.

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ffsm8 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not really. I can obviously say something, like you learn which features the models are able to actually implement, and you learn how to phrase and approach trickier features to get the model too do what you want.

And that's not really explainable without exploring specific examples. And now we're in thousands of words of explanation territory, hence my decision to say it's hard to put it into words.

	▲	devmor 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you’re handwaving away vague, ungrounded intuition and calling it learning. For instance, if I say “I noticed I run better in my blue shoes than my red shoes” I did not learn anything. If I examine my shoes and notice that my blue shoes have a cushioned sole, while my red shoes are flat, I can combine that with thinking about how I run and learn that cushioned soles cause less fatigue to the muscles in my feet and ankles. The reason the difference matters is because if I don’t do the learning step, when buy another pair of blue shoes but they’re flat soled, I’m back to square one. Back to the real scenario, if you hold on to your ungrounded intuition re what tricks and phrasing work without understanding why, you may find those don’t work at all on a new model version or when forced to change to a different product due to price, insolvency, etc.