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Given the subject matter I had to smile at the way the author bungled the detail within the first sentence: > "A while ago, I read this amazing piece about building a ladder."
Hint: a staircase is the same thing as a ladder, just nailed down. On ships they call staircases ladders. Mind blown
Totally. TIL that I can call my blanket a tent and everybody will know what I'm talking about, being that it's the same thing, just nailed down.
If you think reality has a lot of detail, ‘unreality’ will blow your mind. (I’m referring to Hilbert space.)
The reality, in turn, exists independently and does blow your mind every moment given that you are not lowering your attention by deciding what is important and what is not. Children know this perfectly well and can be engaged and mind-blown at every little thing until society forces its rules which in turn develops a layer called personality or ego and after some time only that becomes real. This is where one disconnects from the magic and mind-blowingness of reality, and as a result dissatisfaction, depression and all sorts of mental problems start appearing.
But paying indiscriminate attention to everything can bring back the initial raw perception with all it's joy and wonders and is something they found out in the East, including hinduism and buddhism practices.
I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.
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…
is what I was expecting
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 seem…
I notice this effect all the time when cooking, and the maddening part is how hard it can be to even figure out the right details. Like, the best sausages I ever cooked were at a barbecue in park, on a random public grill with no particular attention to the heat (I think the sausages caught fire briefly), and yet they were amazing . Juicy and delicious, with just the right amount of char on the outside. Over my home…
In other words, it’s probably quite easy to enjoy an ok sausage if it’s come from some random grill in a park because you’ll be focused on having a good time with your friends or family in a park more than on whether the sausage tastes good. If you make it at home (even if you’re inviting those same people) you can easily get yourself worked up about cooking the perfect sausage and whether the temperature is right and whether the time is right and so on, that you’ll just feel like the sausage doesn’t taste so good (and you’ll probably be more careful and critical about tasting the sausage).
Then again maybe the sausages were just undercooked in the park. Or maybe you used different sausages (I’ve found much more variance between sausages being made differently than how they are cooke)
The good scientists have an intuition for problems where the hairy details and solvable and they are good at solving. Part of research is to develop this intuition.
I was hoping this article was going to pivot into mindfulness/psychology or something more abstract like that. > Another way to see that noticing the right details is hard, is that different people end up noticing different details . My brother and I once built a set of stairs for the garage with my dad, and we ran into the problem of determining where to cut the long boards so they lie at the correct angle. After st…
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I think it sort of depends on what you count as different, but I think you're basically right. Power tools alone have made a big difference. Still, I think stairs are conceptually almost identical, including in the internal details, in a way that software really isn't. Maybe the rise/run is a slight different ratio or the stringer is an incidentally different material, or the saw has a battery instead of elbow grease…
Isn't programming all fundementally similar too? Ok, there are a few patterns you need to learn (functional, OOP, etc), and domain specific stuff. But that's also true of physical construction. Knowing how to build stairs is only going to get you so far if you want to build a wardrobe, and probably won't help much at all if you want to build a brick wall.
