Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 304 posts

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#21

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Wildgoose wrote: post #17
CurtMonash wrote: post #8

There's something of a connection here to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two examples come to mind: 1. The narrator thinks it's important to have in your toolset hammers of multiple hardness, because your hammer should be softer than whatever material you're hammering on at the time. At least, that's how I remember it; I might well be wrong about -- well, about the DETAILS of that example. Please correct…

From memory, the student in (2) was female. That has been one of the parts that really struck home with me as well - Change Your Perspective and then Look Again.

Can you expand on that - I'm failing to see how the sex of the student is relevant?

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#22

Post by lazyjones »

Nice story (the first one) about the "top-down" approach, where you discover new complexity and choices at every level. Note how the discovery of new detail ends when you choose to use existing building blocks with known properties, based on experience (e.g. screws instead of examining which of the many possible ways of attaching parts would be most suitable). How simple this would be if you could buy pre-cut boards suitable for stairs at just the right angles and with holes drilled at optimal positions!

Standardising and having a limited set of (appropriate, well-understood) choices at every level is key to building complex projects. Which is probably one of the reasons why software quality isn't really improving...

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#23

Post by jstanley »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #21
Wildgoose wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From memory, the student in (2) was female. That has been one of the parts that really struck home with me as well - Change Your Perspective and then Look Again.

Can you expand on that - I'm failing to see how the sex of the student is relevant?

2 separate points. The student was female (OP said "he"), and also that passage was notable (but not because she was female).

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#24

Post by Hendrikto »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10

Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments,…

To me being able to admit you don‘t know something is part of being intelligent. You need to be intelligent enough to reach the conclusion that you do not know everything.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#25

Post by katzgrau »

I've thought about this too, and generalizing to one more degree, I believe it comes down to perspective. The details are what keep you locked in that perspective.

It's difficult, but invaluable, to truly see things from other perspectives. Once we begin learning the small details of one perspective, our minds seem to develop heuristics for quickly judging all things from that perspective. Attempting to see things from a different perspective slows us down and makes us uncomfortable.

Citation needed, but I sincerely believe our intellectual difference are just a consequence of viewing things through many layers of varied perspectives. So for people who have considered global warming and believe it to be false, it really is false. That is reality. It's all subjective.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#26

Post by KineticLensman »

Jedi72 wrote: post #3

TL:DR; Hofstadter's law.

Hofstadter's law [0]: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Interesting, Hofstadter's original motivation for the law was the observation (published in 1979) about the then delays in computers beating grandmasters at chess (first in 1997 and now routinely_. This gives us a data point about 'just how long' things can take (in addition to the numerous examples from software projects). Nuclear fusion is still out there...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#27

Post by pbhjpbhj »

The suggestion to simply try and notice more detail seems tantamount to advising "just do it better".

Why not ask someone who has done it before, or who does it for a living. There are many domains of human endeavour, but few with no experts. Experience is not necessarily expertise, but the experienced know what details to look for even if they don't know how to fix them.

That to me is another problem of capitalism - people reserve knowledge in order to attract finance with its value; whilst the greatest good is to share that knowledge.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#28

Post by tmalsburg2 »

Great essay. Basically, they say that surprise doesn't tell us so much about the world but more about our model of the world. The degree of surprise can essentially be seen as a measure of our ignorance about some aspect of the world. As such surprise can serve as a guide for improving our understanding. However, it would be a mistake to see ignorance necessarily as a shortcoming. A simplifying model of the world is preferable if it gets the job done. In contrast to that, a perfectly accurate model of the world would render decision-making computationally intractable and is therefore not desirable.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#29

Post by KineticLensman »

There is an excellent example of this type of fiddly detail in Liz England's 2014 blog post about the problems of doors in video games [0]. She identifies about 20 questions you can ask about as a door (as a game designer) and then about 30 different roles (from sound designers [1] to monetization director[2]) who might be involved. Her post works really well because the example is so mundane but the questions are very valid.

[0] http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

[1] "I made the sounds the door creates when it opens and closes."

[2] "We could charge the player $.99 to open the door now, or wait 24 hours for it to open automatically"

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#30

Post by pas »

katzgrau wrote: post #25

I've thought about this too, and generalizing to one more degree, I believe it comes down to perspective. The details are what keep you locked in that perspective. It's difficult, but invaluable, to truly see things from other perspectives. Once we begin learning the small details of one perspective, our minds seem to develop heuristics for quickly judging all things from that perspective. Attempting to see things fr…

Hawking uses the phrase "model dependent realism" for the small subatomic world.

But of course it's perfectly valid for our highly complex human scale world too. And then why do we think the Sun is what we see in pictures? Of course it's that, but it's much more too, and since we don't capture a lot of that in our models (be them photos in various EM gamuts or neutrino counts or whatever numbers), but we only see the surface, we will never experience it up close.

And the same goes for our experience of others' experiences, be it scholarly undertaking in unraveling the mysteries of Earth or simple carpentry/masonry/woodworking/sports.

Even though hundreds of millions of people watch and tens of millions play soccer, no one really has the correct model about playing it on the professional (world cup, UK Premier League) level. Yet every one has a model of soccer, and of course that's their day to day reality. (And they of course do some imperfect subconscious belief update on their models as they go through life, but that's not much compared to an actual rational inquiry using the scientific method - but who has time for that for everything in the world?)

Post reply on HN