Continuing with my new obsession with tea ceremonies, I really liked this video about Gong Fu Cha Tea. For starters, it really makes clear that this is a discipline, not a ritual, like the chinese ceremony. It is a craft designed to enhance your tasting capacity over tea, instead of something to do good tea to just drink. It is a philosophy completely different from the one I described as a comment in the video below. So, this far, there are drinkers of tea, tasters of tea, and ritualists of tea. Even though they might appear so similar that you might think they are the same. But that similarity is just like many others in other contexts that share some history to some point, but then separate and do different purposes. My brainy side will love to do this analogy: Think of the people that use least squares to do triangulation of several measures (like cartographists and phisicists), with the people that are trying to adjust an equation for a prediction as a black box (like machine learning practitioners), and with the people that use it to do causal explanantion of phenomena, like scientists. Same tool, very different purposes, which require an additional “something else”. A something else that, if forgotten or mixed up, well, will give you a bad result. Intention is always tied to purpose and to the idoneity of the tool, and in these sublte distinctions, the devil lives in the details. I think this analogy will serve more students in my private classes of data science than Gong Fu Tea lovers. Or who am I kidding, probably just me. Anyway, it’s always entertaining to make analogies out of the blue. For now, enjoy this video.
