because I keep seeing some variation of this, mostly from capitalists and tech people (and those subjected to that ideology) with no real sensitivity to what is actually involved in creating or learning. To put it plainly, you know when pasta is finished when it's al dente. You know sausage is finished because it's cooked. All other problems (bringing your $3500 face-mounted camera computer into a hot steam-filled environment) aside, the time given in a recipe isn't the thing. Time passed has only a surface relationship to the processes involved in cooking, but it's the only parameter that can be made cleanly instrumental in a way that doesn't involve a practitioner having to learn how to listen to their body, their eyes, their taste buds, their olfactory faculties, their innate sense of real materials in the existing universe coming into contact with one another.
I had a similar experience, also yesterday, in a musical community. Somebody asked how they should go about ear training - a wonderful question. But I was so shocked when everyone came back with interval-quizzing apps. Software that plays two tones then has you listen and identify that tonal distance as a minor Third, Perfect Fifth, and so on. This is the same exact problem as the cooking with AR headset problem. The intervals aren't the thing. Recognizing that one tone is 6 semitones from another tone can be helpful, in the same way that having a rough sense of how much time something should take in boiling water is helpful. But what your brain actually needs is contextual information. How you build this is by working out how the musical ideas you hold in your head - the birthday song, childrens' rhyming tunes, that song that's been stuck in your head since high school prom, whatever - map to the instrument you're learning, its relationship in physical space to your physical body and mind. Raw intervals are only ever relevant in context, and outside of that context they are actively misleading. But they are the parameter that it's possible to shove into an app. So they're what we get, and they're what we reach for.
Ultimately, I feel it's about maintaining an emotional distance. So many of us are trained to find comfort in distance from our bodies, from our faculties, from perception and relationship to the world around us. Skill-building is so much about re-finding that connection, an engaged curiosity ubiquitous in children then worked out of us in a thousand thousand ways.
It's done when it's cooked. You know it's cooked because you learn to trust yourself. I'm pleading with you: there's no need to be afraid.
So many of us are trained to find comfort in distance from our bodies, from our faculties, from perception and relationship to the world around us. Skill-building is so much about re-finding that connection, an engaged curiosity ubiquitous in children then worked out of us in a thousand thousand ways.
It's done when it's cooked. You know it's cooked because you learn to trust yourself. I'm pleading with you: there's no need to be afraid.
And: With skills like this, it's ok to make mistakes the first couple of times. One of the myriad thousand ways the skills to, y'know, build skills is bullied out of us is by aggressively penalizing perceived failure. In fact, relying on a weird glorified AR timer that doesn't actually know how hot something is will fuck up your ability to learn how long things take to cook worse than making mistakes without one.
I know most of these cases end up being more useful for disabled people but I have a hard time imagining how putting on an extremely expensive, heavy gadget that can cause nausea in a high percentage of people in an environment designed to break it down over time does disabled people any favors. Multi-cook timers exist (ThermoWorks.com has some if that aspect is helpful to you), and while they're a little pricey for me personally, they're not $3500 pricey.
