This is something we all do.
Source: I'm planning out a task (taking fully dissolved nmrs of several reaction crudes) into a series of microtasks (weigh out solids into a bunch of vials, screen solvents, dissolve crudes in those solvents, nmr them all together) out loud to my undergrad and suddenly I got a feeling of familiarity which led to me following with "This is a big part of being a chemist: taking a daunting level of work and reducing it to a few, simple, highly parallelized tasks that wont take very long at all."
And I thought, wait, that generalization I made is insanely specific to this situation, why am I saying this is what all chemists do? The feeling of familiarity could have just been at planning itself, not the specific method of planning. It could have been from just parallelization itself in the abstract, why did I have to say link it explicitly to chemistry? We often get a feeling of familiarity after doing something, and tend to generalize this vague familiarity based on whats going on at the time, but can very easily pick out the wrong features to generalize since the feeling itself is vague, its the articulation which follows that we choose and specify.
Source: I'm planning out a task (taking fully dissolved nmrs of several reaction crudes) into a series of microtasks (weigh out solids into a bunch of vials, screen solvents, dissolve crudes in those solvents, nmr them all together) out loud to my undergrad and suddenly I got a feeling of familiarity which led to me following with "This is a big part of being a chemist: taking a daunting level of work and reducing it to a few, simple, highly parallelized tasks that wont take very long at all."
And I thought, wait, that generalization I made is insanely specific to this situation, why am I saying this is what all chemists do? The feeling of familiarity could have just been at planning itself, not the specific method of planning. It could have been from just parallelization itself in the abstract, why did I have to say link it explicitly to chemistry? We often get a feeling of familiarity after doing something, and tend to generalize this vague familiarity based on whats going on at the time, but can very easily pick out the wrong features to generalize since the feeling itself is vague, its the articulation which follows that we choose and specify.
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