Alternatively - "The nicest thing about anything is not knowing what it is." - George Carlin.

Not knowing how a cloud works is magical for instance. But taking this line of thinking too far can be disastrous. There is a happy middle ground.

I don't think so. There is of course a childlike magic in looking at the clouds and dreaming of the people who live there. But the feeling of fantasy a child gets when looking at clouds does only partly stem from not knowing what they consist of.

I have many topics that still fascinate me as much as they did when I was a kid – to be honest, maybe even more than back then, because now I know how ridiculously complex they are and what ultra-specific conditions needed to be there for this to emerge. Knowing more doesn't make things less miraculous, but more so.

And despite knowing a lot about fluid dynamics and clouds I can still just stare at a beautiful cloud in awe and wonder how it would be to live up there in the naive, romantic sense. I know a lot about acoustics and what makes my instrument work, but in the end I can still just sit there and play it. If anything that knowledge allows me to connect more intimately with the world around me

Losing your childlike side is something that happens to many people, because they are afraid of how it is being perceived from the outside – and then they internalize this so much that they don't even allow themselves awe and wonder even inside the privacy of their own heads.

Maybe this is coupled with the Dunning-Kruger effect? So if someone is in the valley of people who don't know a lot, but think they know everything, the wonder of the world around them might indeed be lost for them.

I am completely with this angle as well. In a way I was saying 'Ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer'.

The fluid dynamics thing is a good example. Another one is the Demoscene. I knowing how it is done, or the limitations they are working with - that is where the magic comes from.

You think you know how clouds work?

Did you know that water vapor is less dense than air, so it rises, and this is part of why clouds form?

Seriously, the atomic mass of H2O is 18. Compare to the other major parts of air which are N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40, and CO2 at 44. Everything beyond that is a rounding error.

Therefore, all else being equal, wet air rises.

I didn't mean it 'too' literally, but that is indeed a neat fact.

It’s called the Aesthetic. From aisthanesthai "to perceive (by the senses or by the mind), to feel.” , it’s when your senses are working at their peak and thinking goes to the background.

So you can enjoy an aesthetic experience in a far different manner than the unaesthetic, like reading, or figuring out a puzzle, etc.

This argument was dealt with by Richard Dawkins in his book Unweaving the Rainbow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unweaving_the_Rainbow

> Sometimes I feel sad for people who cannot experience that joy.

I feel the same, but then I think to myself: maybe those people are experiencing some quality of existence that I'm not, and thinking to themselves "this is the life".

My current theory is that everything is a network.

Prove me wrong, find something that's not a node on a complication network.