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

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

#71

Post by ALittleLight » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 1:14 AM UTC

I had a similar experience while visiting my parents recently. Sitting at the kitchen table my mom mentioned they had a small weed problem, and my initial reaction was "No, your yard is fine" because I hadn't noticed any weeds.

After saying that though, I went and walked around their yard and noticed many details I never had before. There were multiple broadleaf weeds including different phases of dandelion and some weeds I couldn't name. There were patches of bare ground and areas where the grass was unusually thick. I saw different kinds of sprinklers and also startled a rabbit while I was walking around.

I was struck, while investigating the lawn, by how before I looked at it, it existed only as a simple object in my mind "Parent's lawn". On closer inspection it has an immense amount of detail.

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

#72

Post by anhldbk » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 1:33 AM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #71

I had a similar experience while visiting my parents recently. Sitting at the kitchen table my mom mentioned they had a small weed problem, and my initial reaction was "No, your yard is fine" because I hadn't noticed any weeds. After saying that though, I went and walked around their yard and noticed many details I never had before. There were multiple broadleaf weeds including different phases of dandelion and some…

Actually you only see what you wanna see, right?

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

#73

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 1:39 AM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #50

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #7

I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.

Too much detail in relation what? Our current computers in 2020? What if the humans that made the simulation are from the year 3020 or 10020?

What do you think the level of detail of the simulation is? If it's simulating down to the atomic or subatomic level, then the only way to simulate that is with a universe at least as big, having turned the whole universe into a computer.

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

#74

Post by incompatible » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 1:46 AM UTC

MH15 wrote: post #2

I remember the last time this article was posted. It's one of my favorite pieces to be posted on this site, thanks for reposting it!

I see that this is at least the 8th time it has been submitted, but only one other led to any discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255

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

#75

Post by harikb » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

combatentropy wrote: post #8

This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship, as opposed to a lot of book-learning in the classroom. In fact I think people do still learn their jobs that way. It's just delayed by several years of book-learning that has little return on investment. When you finally land your job, your first few months are when you really start learning enough to become useful. Disclaimer: I…

While I agree in theory, you are grossly underestimating the amount racism and other forms of phobia that still exists among humans. When “apprenticeship” was the only way to learn, there was no opportunity for the unfortunate ones. School, granted they do a mediocre job, are at least legislated to be fair, secular, and what have you to the those who are otherwise shunned, poor and unfortunate

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

#76

Post by buzzkillington » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #37

combatentropy wrote: post #8

This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship, as opposed to a lot of book-learning in the classroom. In fact I think people do still learn their jobs that way. It's just delayed by several years of book-learning that has little return on investment. When you finally land your job, your first few months are when you really start learning enough to become useful. Disclaimer: I…

I am, sort of, doing an apprenticeship right now. We are building an indoor aquaponics pilot (290 m2/3100 sqft facility). Aquaponics is growing fish, bacteria and vegetables in a recirculating water based system. We are doing this “from scratch” (obviously buying pumps, sensors, tanks etc of the shelf). At the same time I am learning aquaculture (growing fish) in a formal two semester course, as well as reading a bun…

That sounds incredibly interesting, do you have a site for the project?

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

#77

Post by FartyMcFarter » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #73

pier25 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much detail in relation what? Our current computers in 2020? What if the humans that made the simulation are from the year 3020 or 10020?

What do you think the level of detail of the simulation is? If it's simulating down to the atomic or subatomic level, then the only way to simulate that is with a universe at least as big, having turned the whole universe into a computer.

Even if that's true, there's no reason to believe our universe is particularly big for a universe :)

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

#78

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 2:39 AM UTC

There's an entire book about this, well-known to many artists, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". [1]

One of the exercises is to draw a tree. Then to go outside and look at a real tree, and draw what you see.

The two could not be more different.

Many artists will talk about when they "learned to see". Which means: understanding that reality isn't the simplicity of what our brain constructs, but rather the seemingly infinite detail of what is actually out there.

It changes the entire way you look at the world.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...

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

#79

Post by ssivark » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

ganzuul wrote: post #63

ssivark wrote: post #5

This is basically the reason why our current approaches to AI are so woefully inadequate, that they don’t even deserve the name “AI”. The manifestation of this in AI, as first discussed in the 80s, is called the “frame problem”. This is basically the problem with “big” data i.e. more comprehensive data (more columns) rather than more examples (more rows) — it’s difficult to winnow out the relevant features from the i…

Embodied intelligence seems to break this mold, in principle. I believe the principle to get good priors is called reinforcement learning, and that currently the problem you describe is called inductive bias. Or maybe I'm just pushing your goalposts to something I can talk about... There are some really brave ideas being kicked around among the researchers who focus on their passion of AI, as opposed to those who pos…

Embodied intelligence, Inductive bias, etc are the right words but we rarely know how to build them into our models in all but the simplest problems :-) Eg: Our reinforcement learning models are largely stupid and without any great inductive biases. That’s why it takes a crazy amount of training and reward tweaking to even do anything simple.

> There are some really brave ideas being kicked around among the researchers who focus on their passion of AI, as opposed to those who post ever higher benchmark scores. They don't optimize their algorithms because they feel the algo should be serviceable out of the box. Cool stuff is happening.

Where do I find out more about this? :-)

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

#80

Post by ericb » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 3:14 AM UTC

TJSomething wrote: post #19

ericb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience) I don't find this is particularly true of self-taught people. People who are raised in bad coding environments like working alone or, project-based consulting shops may have bad habits. Hint: the habits are not taught in s…

Isn't working alone part of being self-taught? My school tried to teach good habits. Many of the professors are out of touch with what good habits are though, so they usually teach to books of varying quality or practices specific to how they learned a few decades ago.

Yes, but I think there's a stage learning where you learn "this is how I work in a manner that lets me get along with others." There are a lot of ways to gain the knowledge of this stage. One part of it is working on projects that you will maintain for a while--this lets you see the cost of tech debt. Another part of this evolution comes from working with others--you learn where your code falls short, and you learn better conventions.

The right environment helps a programmer evolve through this stage.

In a similar vein, stay at home moms or dads may choose to send their child to daycare a day or two a week to learn how to interact with others. Without these learnings, life, or work, can be more challenging.