High school physics certainly does help you understand momentum, which is the cause of all crashes.
Instead humans rely on visual intuition, which everyone has with or without learning physics.
>Nobody's saying you have to build an airplane to know how it works, the point is you have to know how it works to either build it, or fly it effectively. You won't know why it stalls if you don't know what makes it stay up.
You said it. You quoted Feynman saying it. So if you didn't mean that then you made a mistake here. Ok the. I agree with the rest of your post then.
However my main point still stands the systems we build as humans are too complex for a single person to understand. In order to deal with this complexity most of programming involves investigating and testing libraries that abstract away this complexity. It is more.important to know this then it is to construct highly modular fp style code.
It is true that the fundamentals that SICP teaches will be around forever, but the fact of the matter is, if I'm an employer I'd rather hire a specialist in some arbitrary ephemeral domain relevant to my business then to hire someone who is a generalist.
see my remark above
Nobody's saying you have to build an airplane to know how it works, the point is you have to know how it works to either build it, or fly it effectively. You won't know why it stalls if you don't know what makes it stay up.
The point of the time travel story is that Feynman understands it to the level that would let him recreate the technology from scratch in a society without powered heavier-than-air flight, not that he can compete, John Henry-like, with a Boeing assembly line. That's a good enough level of "can create" to reasonably say you understand something. Nobody outside of Boeing has the built-up engineering expertise to replicate their assembly line, and any equally advanced design would have to be evolved forward over many years.
The problem with MCAS is that the abstraction combined with a lack of specific awareness of the issue made it unclear to the pilots what was going on exactly, or what that meant. Abstraction isn't the problem, but abstraction that masks relevant parts of what's going on (like how many distinct sensors are going into a reading) has to be treated with appropriate respect.