Isn't engineering the opposite? Taking a bunch of the mundane world (physics, chemistry, etc) and building something up until it does suddenly feel like magical black box?
I think of engineering as constraints satisfaction, balancing trilemmas. Like civil engineering. Divine all the bridges which may best satisfy all the requirements. I liken it to finding min/max solutions, in a given problem space. aka optimization.
This metaphor allows for creativity, cleverness, novelty, esthetics.
Most of my software development, production of code, does not meet this standard, so is not "software engineering".
I liken curiosity to foraging. The problem space isn't well known, or poorly defined. Or just new to me. Let's go play, see what we find.
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As for your OC, your form of curiosity is yet another form of smart.
Some people are book smart. Some with better working memory are better at mental gymnastics. Some, like with your book summaries, are smart at generalization, distilling concepts to their essence.
I like to think my form of smart is fondness for metaphors. My contributions to humanity have come from noticing when apparently dissimilar problems can be reframed, using the parallel, applying notions from one problem to another. It's a bit like reframing an optimization challenge to look like Traveling Sales Person, applying all that prior work to a new problem set.
This metaphor allows for creativity, cleverness, novelty, esthetics.
Most of my software development, production of code, does not meet this standard, so is not "software engineering".
I liken curiosity to foraging. The problem space isn't well known, or poorly defined. Or just new to me. Let's go play, see what we find.
--
As for your OC, your form of curiosity is yet another form of smart.
Some people are book smart. Some with better working memory are better at mental gymnastics. Some, like with your book summaries, are smart at generalization, distilling concepts to their essence.
I like to think my form of smart is fondness for metaphors. My contributions to humanity have come from noticing when apparently dissimilar problems can be reframed, using the parallel, applying notions from one problem to another. It's a bit like reframing an optimization challenge to look like Traveling Sales Person, applying all that prior work to a new problem set.