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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)

#181

Post by nlawalker »

hornbaker wrote: post #102
foxhop wrote: post #71

This is an incredible read, very thought invoking. I've never replaced stairs but I have learned enough of the "details" by repairing them (or being aware of them) to know it's a really hard to get right. A single 1/4 inch difference between two steps can feel wrong; a 1/2 inch difference and people will likely stumble or tumble down them on their first approach. Our intuition and pattern recognition impacts how we s…

A gif of what happens when one step is just slightly too high: https://imgur.com/hl3YWJD

A favorite "today I learned" of mine is that staircases in medieval castles were constructed with steps of slightly different heights in order to trip invaders. In particular, the last step at the top of a staircase was tall, with the intent of causing a stumble and generating a loud footfall (for those sneaking around) or sending the intruder into the room headfirst (into a ready weapon, in the case of a siege).

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

#182

Post by GuiA »

nlawalker wrote: post #176

This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair bo…

Frank Lloyd Wright: “You can bring an eraser to the drawing table, or a sledgehammer to the construction site”

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

#183

Post by Retric »

nlawalker wrote: post #176

This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair bo…

"Why don't we just do this?" is incredibly valuable as long as it's not simply saying "We should do this!"

If your building a house the best volume to surface area is going to be a sphere. Why don't we use that? Well it's a pain to work with curves. Well why not a Cube? It _

That _ is going to be a listing of the problems constraints, which most people can't simply list by thinking abstractly.

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

#185

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> If you’re trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

I know this article is not about AI, even remotely- but, oh my dog, it so is. It's like, you can do really well if you carefully select the borders of your problem domain- ImageNet, Go, Phenix, AZ; but when you try to use the same super powerful tools in an unconstrained situation (imagine a self-driving car in Mumbai; or playing Warcraft) then all those little noisy, unpredictable, unmodellable details in the real world kick your models' accuracy to the curb.

In fact, I think most AI folks have figured this out by now and that this realisation is a very big reason why AI has advanced with leaps and bounds in recent years. But we're still up against impossible odds here.

And this should be put to the attention of the Singularitarians- you don't know what you don't know yet. It might look like things are about to go exponential, but you never know what's behind the next bend. As Solon said to Croesus, "Count no man happy until the end is known".

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

#186

Post by dekhn »

logfromblammo wrote: post #143
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…

If you smash a salt crystal with a hammer, all the resulting pieces end up with equal charges of anions and cations, so were any ionic bonds really broken? That covalent bonds are broken seems obvious if you ditch the paper and cut through a sheet of long-chain polyethylene. The scissors don't just stop if they're about to break a polymer chain.

I think even the salt crystal will have some ionic bonds broken- smashing it with a hammer should generate a bunch of kinetic energy which converts to heat, some of the heat will exceed the ionic bond strength, and break bonds.... right?

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

#187

Post by zafka »

I really love the title of this essay. The essay itself and the comments are also delightful. I am going to start using this at my job (where I write embedded code for medical devices). This fact gets so much more apparent when code gets put in production devices, and you see the affect of tolerance stack-ups of hundreds of parts. I also think this is why i feel very optimistic about finding new and exciting things in the world. So many people accept the reality of things that someone has explained, while there are actually many variations yet to be revealed.

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #94
grigjd3 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've sometimes had the problem as well. Usually because my self esteem had been based heavily on believing that I'm really smart.

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by rytill »

yyzhero wrote: post #129
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sometimes had the problem as well. Usually because my self esteem had been based heavily on believing that I'm really smart.

Don't blame yourself. Go read argument culture. Everything is positioned as a debate rather then a discussion ; take an opposing side and it's about winning not understanding. As an example If you've caught yourself ever leveraging syntax in a discussion to derail someone's ideas

Can you elaborate on “leveraging syntax”? Like commenting on the structure of their argument?

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

#190

Post by debt »

nlawalker wrote: post #176

This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair bo…

"they look terrible"

Well then don't do a shitty job? I mean if the budget is there, then yeah, just build me some stairs.

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