Temporary supports in 3D printing are when temporary support beams are used to help build the structure, but are meant to be removed afterwards.

It's a really beautiful concept because I think it can also be applied to learning. When you're teaching someone a really difficult concept, maybe because there's a lot of nuance or the scope of it is large, it can be very hard to just explain it outright. Usually it's beneficial to provide "lies" or create fake connections between ideas for the sake of easy explanation. Then, once the broader picture can be made clear, the connections are removed.

January 3, 2021

So this actually has a really elegant connection to my Simplify project. In the project, I talk about dependencies and relationships being "abstracted":

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/1cb74e1a-811d-4768-9c0a-896ab039ba93/Screen_Shot_2020-12-03_at_1.14.02_PM.png

So this is exactly where the idea of temporary supports come in. When learning a large new concept such as a computer, there's a lot to learn about. To simplify learning, you can say that the display communicates with the trackpad to move the mouse on screen when a user moves their finger on the cursor. This isn't completely true since of course, the trackpad's change goes to the CPU as an event which gets processed by the OS before it updates the display. The "real" relationship can be quite a bit deeper in the tree, but it's unnecessary to teach all that at the outset.

Another example in biology: the central dogma is often taught as DNA → RNA → proteins. This is true on a high level but DNA does not just transform into RNA and same for RNA and Proteins. They get translated by the RNA polymerase, and ribosomes effectively. There's Okazaki fragments, amino acid tables, and loads of other complexities being hidden when we say "DNA turns into RNA turns into proteins". But that's okay. Without that hidden complexity, we would never be able to understand the concepts well enough or it would take far too much time. Learning things in chunks and digesting it into smaller and smaller pieces until we get to the "real truth" (which are probably active areas of research), is how we naturally learn.