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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)

#81

Post by Recursing »

falcolas wrote: post #72
dsr_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say. One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and sugge…

Err, Bozeman doesn't have an opera house. Certainly not one with a burger stand across Main Street. Just sayin' ;)

Maybe there used to be one? https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/a-number-of-y...

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

#82

Post by harpiaharpyja »

simias wrote: post #54

This article points out exactly why even though I like to tinker with a lot of stuff my main hobby is always programming. Because programming is more akin to writing down maths than building a staircase. Algorithms don't warp because of humidity, algorithms don't have leakage current. Sure computers have their quirks (overflows, floating point issues, UB etc...) but it's still a finite amount of knowledge unlike the…

It depends. I've been stuck with a very large, very old, particularly awful legacy codebase before, and doing anything with it starts to resemble building the staircase.

Find the cause of a bug. Oh, but the fix isn't clear, because it turns out the "bug" isn't a programming error as it was - two people who had two slightly different but incompatible interpretation over the meaning and purpose of some subsystem (whose creator didn't document anything because hey, gotta meet deadlines). So now we have to decide what is the most correct way to resolve this while breaking the least amount of stuff... hmm, we could refactor this, separate that, give this a clearer purpose... oh, but surprise, it's tightly coupled to this, which is tightly coupled to that, which is tightly coupled to... FML.

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

#83

Post by monochromatic »

tome wrote: post #80
jasode wrote: post #53

>Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? The author mentioned bicycles and inadvertently missed an opportunity to show another "unknown reality" that beautifully illustrates his point. Consider typical adults (not physicists) with 20+ years of bicycle riding. If you ask them, "how does a bicycle turn?" , they'd respond that "you just lean into the direction of the turn and…

Have you actually tried turning a bicycle without countersteering? I have, the last time the topic was discussed on HN. I found I was able to turn without any perceptible countersteer. It's technically possible that I do have to countersteer for a small number of miliseconds over a small number of milimeters, but my experience leads me to doubt it.

A moped (and I assume a motorcycle) is a lot harder to turn without countersteering. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s more massive or what.

Anyway, learning to ride a moped was when I first consciously discovered countersteering. It made things a lot easier after that point.

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

#84

Post by grigjd3 »

barry0079 wrote: post #50
codingdave wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a person who basically made it through college without internet, I can tell you that I had just as much trouble admitting I was wrong when I didn't have access to the internet, perhaps more because I was younger and more hotheaded.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

shoover wrote: post #60
codingdave wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is absurd how people actually do this all the time in Amazon product questions. Will it work with my Samsung phone? "I don't know." Does it come with batteries? "I think it did."

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by stult »

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 would be interested to see the evidence for that inverse correlation. I remember seeing a study not so long ago which implied that higher intelligence individuals made poor managers. As did lower intelligence people. There's a sweet spot somewhere a little above average where you're smart enough to do the job but not so smart that you can't relate to employees and customers. I would not be surprised to see the same phenomenon in start ups, though admittedly I don't know if that study was especially reliable given the modern state of the social sciences.

My instinct is to question the causality anyway, because I think you highlight a strong candidate for the actual, underlying limitation on intelligent leaders: humility. My hypothesis would be that the negative leadership performance is actually a proxy measure of humility, which on average is lower with higher intelligence, likely because of the praise effect you describe.

Because I don't think it makes sense that intelligent leaders are less able to question their frame of thought or significant details supporting it. Or rather less capable in carrying out the actual cognitive task of self-questioning. Quite the opposite, because general intelligence is a measure of the correlation between performance on all cognitive tasks, so it's practically tautological that higher IQ individuals would be stronger within that cognitive domain. Which makes me think it must be their willingness or propensity to engage in the process of self-questioning.

To bring it back around to the OP, details matter, but the process for selecting relevant and filtering out irrelevant details matters most. Humility may be one way to enhance that process. Though maybe there is also a limit. Too much questioning prevents the establishment of a stable, actionable consensus. An inability to shut out irrelevant stimuli is disabling to individuals and organizations. Like Funes the Memorious, you get lost in minutiae.

I don't know where the ideal balance lies, but I wish I was better at finding it in practice.

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

#87

Post by seszett »

jerf wrote: post #59
jasode wrote: post #53

>Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? The author mentioned bicycles and inadvertently missed an opportunity to show another "unknown reality" that beautifully illustrates his point. Consider typical adults (not physicists) with 20+ years of bicycle riding. If you ask them, "how does a bicycle turn?" , they'd respond that "you just lean into the direction of the turn and…

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 YouTube channel Smarter Every Day tries to ride a bike that has been hacked to reverse which way the wheel goes when the handlebars are turned, which also reveals how much bike riding skill is implicit. (I also experience the "clicking" he refers to around 6:10 when I switch between QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It takes about 15-30 seconds to switch, even after all…

About your keyboard, my experience after having used both a (Canadian multilingual) QWERTY MacBook and other computers with regular AZERTY keyboards for years, is that everytime I use some keyboard that vaguely feels Apple-y (with flat keys, white or grey) I somehow try to use it as a QWERTY. Then after a few seconds of mistyping things, I can eventually use it correctly, but it really seems like it's the look of the keyboard that makes me choose which layout I use.

It's probably different for everyone, in my case my brain has found the look of the keyboard to be the best predictor, for others it could be something else. But it's really interesting, sometimes it takes me a while before I notice that, indeed, this keyboard looks a bit like a Mac keyboard.

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

#88

Post by grigjd3 »

mjburgess wrote: post #15
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,…

Well. People still don't know, but now they have enough information to seem as-if they do. Understanding is not a matter of a google. It's a decade of relevant experience. You might beat the PhD to the factoid phrase, but when you come to employ the fact in the relevant problem you won't even know where to begin or even what it really meant. People aren't exercising their ability to distinguish parroting from underst…

One thing a PhD taught me was how thoroughly limited my expertise is.

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

#89

Post by sudhirj »

telchar wrote: post #77
dekhn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long part of my scientific career has been unpacking simple statements about things like bike riding, and finding the underlying process is subtle, and reveals many interesting things. When I was a kid, I had a teacher who said that cutting paper wasn't a chemical change- no bonds were broken. That seemed odd to me, but after I had a PhD, I understood a few things better. That when you cut paper, mostly hydrogen bo…

I'll bite.. what are the huge implications?

Could striking a match be viewed as cutting paper?

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

#90

Post by dekhn »

sudhirj wrote: post #89
telchar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite.. what are the huge implications?

Could striking a match be viewed as cutting paper?

no, that's combustion, clearly a chemical reaction. Sure, you can use a laser to cut paper, but the teacher was talking about scissors.
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