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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

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

#41

Post by k__ »

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,…

I think we have two problems at the moment.

1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident.

2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.

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

#42

Post by cdancette »

k__ wrote: post #41
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,…

I think we have two problems at the moment. 1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident. 2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.

While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ? I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.

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

#43

Post by lazyjones »

zaphar wrote: post #36
lazyjones wrote: post #22

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…

When it comes to my day job building software I choose opinionated languages and libraries because they limit the choices I have to make which makes me more productive. But when I'm playing around in my off time I employee alternative ways of doing things with unusual or niche languages so I can explore details in more depth.

Same here. But I find code reuse problematic: people tend to build large libraries with complex APIs and too many options (typically also lacking sane defaults) instead of small, focused code "blocks" that can be well understood and tested and do one single thing very well. It's like having to fasten a nut and being offered 3 types of swiss army knives as your available tools. Same with operating systems, web development frameworks etc. ... Too many options, too little thorough understanding, stable interfaces.

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

#44

Post by mojuba »

Two things that came to mind while reading this essay:

- The effect of a surprise when facing unexpected complications/details is because our brains tend to simplify things, or rather simplify the model of the world that we maintain. When you first hear that water boils at 100º your brain really really wants to assume it's that simple, no more than that. Simplifications are crucial for optimising the brain's power consumption, which it tends to minimize all the time.

- The amount of detail in human built stuff, as well as in our understanding of the world is a result of many centuries of perfecting and improving those things. Go a few millenia back and look at the stairs we were building then, they were awful. Or the fact that the process of boiling is so complex is a result of relatively recent discoveries in physics, just a few centuries ago.

Funny thing is, the details of the reality around us will only get more complex over time. Suppose in a few centuries from now stairs will be so complex and so perfect that no individual will be able to build them on their own.

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

#45

Post by thathappened »

codingdave wrote: post #39
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,…

Why would I jump into a thread, on any site, just to say I don't know? There are thousands of threads just on HN that I just let scroll by without participating because I don't know enough to add to the discussion. Explicitly calling out my lack of knowledge on every thread would serve no purpose to anybody. Online written communications will never follow the same patterns as direct communication, and that is a good…

Excluding reddit

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

#46

Post by k__ »

cdancette wrote: post #42
k__ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we have two problems at the moment. 1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident. 2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.

While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ? I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.

Is it?

Who could qualify this?

I mean, you found a company, talk to the right people and get rich.

If you just happen to find the wrong people, you won't get rich.

Sure, you could say the sales people were skilled and found these people, but how often is this really true and how often do you just luck out by finding the right number on some obscure website?

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

#47

Post by pixl97 »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

>The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth; rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The implied individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel.

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

#48

Post by hashkb »

> you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

I disagree. With physical objects there is elbow grease; a reality mistake on the level of a typo is minor compared to a programming typo which is as good as having no program written at all.

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

#49

Post by woliveirajr »

KineticLensman wrote: post #29

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 ve…

> Network Programmer: “Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?”

Brings me the question on wheter the "reality" is the same for everybody.

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

#50

Post by barry0079 »

codingdave wrote: post #39
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,…

Why would I jump into a thread, on any site, just to say I don't know? There are thousands of threads just on HN that I just let scroll by without participating because I don't know enough to add to the discussion. Explicitly calling out my lack of knowledge on every thread would serve no purpose to anybody. Online written communications will never follow the same patterns as direct communication, and that is a good…

The problem isn't people not admitting ignorance online. The problem is that the internet might be the cause of people not admitting ignorance in real life.
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