Someone is about to sit on the edge of a table. You know it’s going to cause the table to tip, so you rush over to stop them before it’s too late.
“You were about to tip that table!” you exclaim.
“How did you know?” they ask.
How did you know?
Well, you could calculate it. You know the mass of the friend, you can measure the offset of the table edge from the nearest legs. You can estimate the mass and centre of gravity of the table. Then it’s just a simple overturning check.
M_overturn = m_friend * x_friend M_restore = m_table * x_table
If M_overturn > M_restore the table will tip.
But you didn’t do that, did you? Even as a structural engineer, you didn’t do that.
You just knew.
You’ve seen tables in your life thousands of times. You’ve sat on the edges often. You’ve watched other people sit on the edges.
Sometimes they tipped. Sometimes they didn’t.
You internalised this and now you have an intuitive sense of how much force you can apply to the edge of a table before tipping it.
Your uncle has this intuition too and he’s never opened a textbook.
The exposure is free with tables. You see and interact with them every day and intuition assembles whether you’re paying attention or not.
You need the calculation to prove the table will tip. You never needed it to know it would.
In engineering, you get a handful of reps a year if you’re lucky. When a problem arrives, passive exposure isn’t enough. You have to deliberately engage with the problem.
Not: “let me run a calculation”
But: “How do I think this is going to behave? What do I predict happens here?”
Then you get feedback. If it didn’t match your prediction, you ask why, and you adjust.
This is the beginning of developing judgement - in the prediction, not the answer.
Calcs on their own don’t build your intuition. Calcs you’ve already predicted the answer to build it every time.