One of my favorite blog posts of all time.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
31–40 of 234 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP. In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP. In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP. Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA? It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government, And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly tox…
> It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government I don't think anyone has a problem with the question being asked. It's the non-scientific method of experimentation that is troubling people.
And the clear bias in the presentation of numbers in the "question".
What people called the "Government" provided rather different things 200 years ago, let alone issues with defining a comparable "GDP" in such different environments.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#33This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems. As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky. This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex. And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodat…
In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP. In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP. In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP. Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA? It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government, And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly tox…
I'll bite. Lets break the highest number down, Fermi-style.
=> 30% social services
=> 10% military and education
=> 10% healthcare
Leaves 10% for infrastructure (road/rail), governmental services (police, regulation of trade, traffic, construction), damage-control for innovations like leaded gas, CFCs, asbestos. And of course overhead to run the whole thing.
I'd honestly say thats not really a bad deal. Are there gonna be inefficiencies in the whole apparatus? For sure! But getting rid of those services, and trying to do this personally with the taxes you saved strikes me as completely infeasible.
edit: forgot research (CERN, ITER, etc.), which would be particularly tricky to fund privately.
PS: I was initially skeptical myself, and expected double digit percentages of unclear worth. But actually breaking this down gave me strong Monthy Python ("what have the romans ever done for us") vibes, and now I think that your point is much worse than it looks first glance (still don't understand why it would get flagged, though).
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#34This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems. As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky. This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex. And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodat…
> Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality
No argument.
But is that reality public service? Or something else?
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?
why is our perception and the way it works different from the universe? with enough agency, and ignoring everything else in the world you realize that your perception is all there is, that you can ever be sure of. There is no universe, there is no quantum physics. Those are just models, your perception models them.
Surely, keeping a 1:1 match between our perception of the universe and the universe itself is a kind of order that would be constantly under threat by the inexorable move towards increasing entropy. The lack of match either now or in the future is what you would expect. Chaos is the expect state, order is the exception. Hence you should not expect for that match to exist by default
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#36The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can look there is a huge amount of detail.
Maybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?
That presupposes a distinction between the universe and the observer. The idea that any such distinction is an illusion is both ancient and profound. (Perhaps even obvious, at least in the abstract.)
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#37a.k.a "Humans are unsurprisingly such simpletons when forming their mental model of reality, and always oversimplify."
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#38The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can look there is a huge amount of detail.
The other problem is that all the details matter all the time.
Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you are going to have to start to take into account the position and movement of people standing around the table watching it. The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.
And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer the timelines.
Like if you want to manage a economy.
It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level" and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each individual in a national economy. It should be possible to simply plot out the results of their decision making over time and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful policy decisions and 5 year plans.
The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details matter all the time.
Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and decision making based on your decision making, which then changes the behavior and decision making of every other individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the forces of every other economy and visa versa.
Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators. Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the information you are basing your decisions off of.
So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions. The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies based on the information you do have tends to destroy what little value it has left.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#39One of my favorite blog posts of all time.
its a pretty great realization to come along. We are all stardust, but complicated bits and blobs of atoms and molecules.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#40[flagged]