I would like to belatedly apologize for the terseness of my response—I realize now that I was basically punishing you for not hearing what I didn’t say, which was wrong of me.
In point of fact, I think Langewiesche was not quite correct—you can do things well without theory. Look at control systems. What theory lets you do is predict which practices will do well. We don’t give children the Peano axioms, but we try to make sure what we teach them accords with those axioms.
I would like to belatedly apologize for the terseness of my response—I realize now that I was basically punishing you for not hearing what I didn’t say, which was wrong of me.
In point of fact, I think Langewiesche was not quite correct—you can do things well without theory. Look at control systems. What theory lets you do is predict which practices will do well. We don’t give children the Peano axioms, but we try to make sure what we teach them accords with those axioms.