Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 8:43 PM UTC

ansgri wrote: post #192

pavel_lishin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a language that has citations built into statements of fact or belief; you modify statements based on how you came to know them. If someone asks, "Where is Alice?", your answer of "Alice is fishing" would be phrased differently depending on whether he told you he was going fishing, or whether Bob told you he saw her fishing, or whether you saw her fishing. There's nothing like that online, so any given advice…

Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime ?

I think I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language was what I had in mind.

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

#242

Post by joe_the_user » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

"You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing."

This is a great point. It has another corollary that people who are good X approach aren't necessarily good judges of whether approach X is good. The standard answer to "that seems like an excessively complex way to do it" is generally "that because you don't have experience with doing it the right way" and that could be right or it could be wrong. Often, the experienced and the inexperienced have about equal chance to guess on the meta-level whether this is true.

When OOP was the next big thing, a whole array of people defended against objections with arguments around those not liking it "doing it wrong", which we now, mostly, know were ridiculous right? Of course we know...

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

#243

Post by RMGgondella » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

stult wrote: post #86

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…

It's kind of the Peter Principle: You rise to your own level of incompetence. Hopefully, you don't get boosted past that level. Then you can instruct and manage the next down level.

You make an excellent point about filtering out the irrelevant. The wood is brown, for example, is irrelevant to building a proper staircase. The angle of decline is highly relevant.

But, with regard to leadership, the Peter Principle (identified by Laurence J. Peter and published in 1969) is in inverse correlation to performance, I believe. Particularly if performance is tied to being able to communicate with the success of the high performer at that level, because they might not have met their own level of the Peter Principle.

And, after communicating, one must be able to act. If a person has reached their Peter Principle level, they will be incompetent at the task -- which is why so many managers are hated.

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

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Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

wetmore wrote: post #235

TeMPOraL wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5" And, as I've recently learned, two-by-four is in fact 1½ × 3½ inches. How on Earth does that make sense? Why do people call things as if they were X, while knowing perfectly well they're not X? Is this an American thing?

2x4 lumber is cut into rough boards in the milling process which are actually 2 by 4. These are dried (at which point they shrink) and planed (the wood will warp a bit during the drying process, jointing and planing will help correct this) so the resulting boards are smaller than their original 2x4 size. Some more surprising detail in reality :)

Heh. I feel that reality is just that beautiful, never-ending fractal of annoyance...

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

#245

Post by asavadatti » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

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

Also interesting how people speed up after tripping.

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

#246

Post by jccooper » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

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…

If anyone ever refuses to believe this, have them steer using just their palms. Especially, try to turn left or right using just one palm.

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

#247

Post by gambiting » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

le-mark wrote: post #127

sly010 wrote: post #117

A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be? Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a litt…

If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.

Ha, at my partner's work(large IT company in UK) they are not even allowed to move or adjust the height of their own desks, because it's a health and safety violation and if anything happened to them doing it the insurance wouldn't cover them. I think HR would get a heart attack at the thought of employees assembling their own desks.

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

#248

Post by tempestn » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

cricalix wrote: post #34

tempestn wrote: post #14

Having never done any carpentry nor googled the answer, the first thing that's coming to mind is to place the board at the angle you want, then use a straight edge (like a level) extended out from the floor of the upper story to trace a line on the board. Cut the board, then flip it over so that cut side is on the bottom, and then repeat the process to cut the top. Edit: I guess my first line will read as a disclaime…

I think you've got a slight problem with this approach, that a diagram should illustrate if you draw the board as a rectangle and not a line. Thought experiment time: Let us assume that you rest the board in such a manner that the angle between the edge of the board and the vertical wall is 45 degrees. The edge of the board is tangential to the corner of the wall and the upper floor, and you scribe the horizontal lin…

Ah yes. I thought through it picturing the diagram in my head rather than looking at it. In my mental picture the board was sitting on top of the edge of the top floor, rather than coming up to flush with it. Which obviously doesn't make sense in retrospect!

What's coming to mind next is a horizontal cut as first described (placing at the angle you want). Flip, then vertical cut, and finally trim the end with the horizontal cut by making a parallel cut offset by the amount the board extends above the upper floor. I'm sure there's a better way though. Non-trivial indeed. :)

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

#249

Post by falcolas » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #140

falcolas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great. Next you're probably going to tell me that Santa Claus isn't real either. :-(

Well, we do still have a couple of good burger joints from which you can admire some classical turn-of-the-century masonry from...

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

#250

Post by rocqua » Fri, Jan 19, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

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.

You reminded me of this comment (www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/19qonw/any_advice_on_how_to_get_remotivated_for_studying/c8qia6b) on reddit. I wish I'd have read that sooner.