[flagged]
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
41–50 of 234 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You can be born with your perception. For example, opposite sexes generally attract and you don’t really have to teach this. We’re born to see things the same, but somehow we work to obstruct this by modding our perception. When one person mods their perception, they become god ( a creator). For example, you aren’t the tallest one in the room but you see yourself as that. You create a reality, and this is something people are addicted to and causes all the harm in the world (someone is manipulating our shared perception with their lie).
Reality is a repository that we must all be good maintainers of. Beware the false PR (delusions).
Which brings me to the the author’s article. Many creatures on earth, past and present, omit or ignore all the little details. They live a lie that is just as intricate as the details. Details matter if the details matter to you. Humans are world builders, and they will reshape the details to see what they want. So will a snake, its own tail can look like its food if necessary.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#43Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#44Related. Others?
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 2023 (136 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597 - June 2023 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 2021 (118 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006256 - July 2021 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 2020 (115 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 2018 (294 comments)
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#45Imagine being a lumberjack and wood literally changed its properties every few years due to updates. They would be so pissed.
Or if you came into a construction job and the guy who was building stairs did not understand gravity, and was just using an AI to guide him.
Finally you’re working on a house and whenever you set up your drywall, it just does nothing. Turns out you were setting up drywall on the other side of the house. Common mistake.
Programming isn’t like carpentry - it’s closer to magical carpentry.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#46The 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…
You sound like you would really enjoy the book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have failed.
I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I recently read about a study where participants were asked to pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4 variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in another. Then, each group was either distracted while pondering, or allowed to think through it directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the missable details.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#47I attended a woo-woo university course, where the instructor invited a interpretative dancer to give a lesson.
The dancer bright out some paper, pencils, and almonds, and had everyone spend half an hour silently writing about their single almond. As it turns out, it's easier than it sounds; time passed quick and I (and most others) never felt bored. There's always more room for observation and analysis.
It struck me as a critical life lesson about the power of perception and attention. Every moment is infinite, and therefore it's a fool's task to try and learn/experience "everything".
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#48a.k.a "Humans are unsurprisingly such simpletons when forming their mental model of reality, and always oversimplify."
There's the reasonable amount of oversimplification necessary to just get through life, then there's actively trying to oversimplify because it makes life "easier".
I judge people very harshly based on whether they accept reality as complex or rail against it. I am not proud that I do it, but it seems like it has value.
I feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people who are unpleasant to have in my life. So many "simplicity-oriented" people are happy to burden others with "the details" but are unwilling to actually "pay" others to bear that burden. They're pretty vile people.
Edit: The people who recognize the value in offloading complexity and do "pay" (often handsomely) and are the best Customers to have. I've had some really rewarding financial and personal relationships with people who recognize their offloading complexity is a service you provide.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#49This is what the DOGE guys don’t understand: even if it seems you can easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is in the detail.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#50This is what the DOGE guys don’t understand: even if it seems you can easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is in the detail.
They don’t care.
They don’t care about ‘saving money’, they’re just messing about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like chickens.