Word.ws English Dictionary

mechanical sympathy

mechanical sympathy noun: the concept that someone can use a tool or system most effectively when they have a deep understanding of how it works.

Noun

mechanical sympathy (uncountable)

  1. The concept that someone can use a tool or system most effectively when they have a deep understanding of how it works.
    • Together, we developed a sense of what the A.I. could do. Ben, who had more experience with it than I did, seemed able to get more out of it in a stroke. As he later put it, his own neural network had begun to align with GPT-4's. I would have said that he had achieved mechanical sympathy.2023 November 13, James Somers, “A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft”, in The New Yorker, New York, N.Y.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 29 Jan 2025

Origin of mechanical sympathy

Coined by Scottish racing driver Jackie Stewart.

Questions about mechanical sympathy

What does mechanical sympathy mean?
Mechanical sympathy means the concept that someone can use a tool or system most effectively when they have a deep understanding of how it works.
What part of speech is mechanical sympathy?
Mechanical sympathy is a noun.

Words near mechanical sympathy in the dictionary

  1. mechanical shovels
  2. mechanical splice
  3. mechanical splices
  4. mechanical stoker
  5. mechanical stokers
  6. mechanical sympathy
  7. Mechanical Turker
  8. Mechanical Turkers
  9. mechanicalist
  10. mechanicalists
  11. mechanicality

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mechanical sympathy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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