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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

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

#101

Post by jebarker »

kimixa wrote: post #32
jebarker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Did you mean to reply to me? I don't see how this counters what I said. If you mean to imply that the questions use of statistics is a comparable problem to the current "government experiment" then I don't agree.

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

#102

Post by nuancebydefault »

andrewflnr wrote: post #69
amrodst wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.

"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake. Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inc…

Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.

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

#103

Post by nuancebydefault »

lolinder wrote: post #97
cbracketdash wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree its quite annoying. But it only comes up because of the massive change it will cause across the whole country and it's important to remain prepared for implications.

A large percentage of HN's population doesn't live in the US, and many of those of us who do have other ways of keeping track of what's going on. Threads about DOGE on HN are not useful, they're almost always just flame wars. Those who feel enlightened by them can join the daily thread that inevitably pops up and leave the rest of us to talk about other things.

In fact there are much worse things going on in the world than the hollowing of US' institutions. Let's just root for those people in need.

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

#104

Post by nuancebydefault »

peterfirefly wrote: post #85
BobaFloutist wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think probably the slaves in 1800, whose experience of the government was its violent enforcement of their sub-human status would probably find the protection of their civil rights in 2024 France to be quite a bit more than 28x as valuable, yes. I think the women who couldn't independently own property, had no protections against marital rape, being beat by their husbands, or most any other form of abuse would agre…

How much of that required a bigger state? The end of slavery was really due to slavery being uneconomic. That's why the Northern states didn't have slavery. It would have ended in the South as well, even without the Civil War (which was a kind of big state thing, of course). Children forced to labour without pay -- also an economic issue.

Even though US is more wealthy than Europe, the average European seems struggling much less than their US counterpart. Just have a look at poverty, homelessness, health figures, even of educated people.

The latest votes, and your comment, only seem to indicate that US people on average find that to be fine enough, the price for a (for me weird) kind of freedom.

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

#105

Post by bee_rider »

coliveira wrote: post #3

The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can look there is a huge amount of detail.

What does it mean for the universe to have a fractal nature, other than that it looks more detailed the closer you look?

I mean, I think it is very poetic to suppose the universe has some sort of underlying fractal structure. But… perhaps the universe just looks like it has a fractal structure because the finest details are pretty small relative to us. At the bottom, the atoms, electrons, and quarks are more like potentials anyway, right?

They don’t have solid surfaces anyway. Maybe we can plot the potential fields in a way that makes them look like fractals? But… my modern physics, fields and waves, and even my mathematical understanding of fractals are all a bit rusty (so, what am I even doing in this conversation? Oh well), but shouldn’t the potential fields eventually be smooth at some point? And fractals are not very smooth.

Therefore I conclude the universe doesn’t have a fractal structure, it is just very small. But that isn’t poetic at all. :(

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

#106

Post by doug_durham »

coliveira wrote: post #3

The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can look there is a huge amount of detail.

How much of that is new detail versus repeated patterns? A good approximation of all human visual reality fits in a 5GB diffusion model.

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

#107

Post by patcon »

snikeris wrote: post #52

> If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived This may seem like impractical advice. How does one increase the scope of perception? Personally, I’ve found that a meditation practice leads to this.

I always think of it as learning to see hidden dimensions, and once seen, investigate deeper or just imagine transformations of that dimension -- extrapolation, inversion, etc. Once found, you can drag around these hidden dimensions from one domain or one instance to the next.

Like sometimes I seem to be in alignment with someone, but things feel off. I once realized the "off" feeling was because I was running toward something I believed in, and they're running away from another thing that scared them. It's only circumstantial we were intellectually walking in the same direction, so I tread thoughtfully in collaboration with this person. It's attractive force vs repulsive.

Once I knew to look for this "away vs toward" dimension, I see it often :)

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

#109

Post by kimixa »

jebarker wrote: post #101
kimixa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you mean to reply to me? I don't see how this counters what I said. If you mean to imply that the questions use of statistics is a comparable problem to the current "government experiment" then I don't agree.

No, I was intending to build upon what you said that the question likely isn't actually being asked in good faith, instead an attempt to "anchor" readers into the assumptions it makes rather than really examine the answer, and people may indeed then have issues with it.

To really design experiments we really need to be asking meaningful questions about comparable metrics, after all.

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

#110

Post by cbracketdash »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #103
lolinder wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large percentage of HN's population doesn't live in the US, and many of those of us who do have other ways of keeping track of what's going on. Threads about DOGE on HN are not useful, they're almost always just flame wars. Those who feel enlightened by them can join the daily thread that inevitably pops up and leave the rest of us to talk about other things.

In fact there are much worse things going on in the world than the hollowing of US' institutions. Let's just root for those people in need.

I apologize for my naïevty: I guess I live in a bubble
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