: What’s the difference between ‘conceptual knowledge’ and ‘technical knowledge’ ?
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its the difference between knowing that tomatoes are fruit and knowing that you shouldnt put them in a fruit salad.
or knowing that you can build a voltage follower out of an operational amplifier by just routing the output back to the inverting input and knowing that you should put a resistor in that path despite there being nominally no current flow to limit any power-on inrush currents that could damage the opamp.
building things requires a lot of knowledge about things that only exist in real world devices and not in the approximations that are used to reason about things but which straight up break the device if you dont include them in your design
Conceptual knowledge:. I understand in general the how a computer network works. I understand what the layers involves are, what common security measures are, different approaches and their trade-offs, etc….
Technical knowledge: I know how to physically connect and logically configure switches, firewalls, and computers to implement those concepts.
Conceptual knowledge would allow you to tell someone how do do something, technical knowledge would require that you know how to do it yourself.
I understand the concept of drywalling, but I guarantee that if I try to do my own drywalling it’s not going to go smoothly the first time and I’m going to wind up learning new things along the way.
Conceptual : Turning the steering wheel allows the car to turn.
Technical : Rotating the steeering wheel turns the input shaft on the steering rack which translates it to a linear movement to push / pull the knuckles via the tie rods that will rotate the inner wheel more than the outside one to allow sharp turns.
Conceptual knowledge: I know a car can bring me from A to B
Technical knowledge: I know how to drive a car.
It might be clearer to retitle your options as theoretical and practical knowledge.
Conceptual/theoretical knowledge is the high theory of something on paper, while technical/practical knowledge is the understanding of how the physical thing works on front of you.
For example I may conceptually understand how the internal combustion engine works, but I am not necessarily able to diagnose a problem with my car and repair it, which is the practical/technical knowledge.
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