[HN Gopher] Knowledge is like a house of cards
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Knowledge is like a house of cards
Author : fernandohur
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-05-05 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fhur.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (fhur.me)
| anyfoo wrote:
| > A so-called "senior" developer started screaming at the
| compiler, then at the IDE, then at the operating system, then at
| his colleagues. He was frustrated.
|
| This is one of the worst traps to fall into. I call it out
| whenever I can to people who fall into this: It's never the
| compiler, it's never the CPU, and if you're an application
| developer, it's never the OS. And if it is you can only get to
| that conclusion by assuming it still isn't, unless, Sherlock
| Holmes style, you are left with no choice. Never let it be your
| working hypothesis, always try to find out how those things
| working correctly matches your observations instead.
|
| Working on very low level code, I _do_ run into actual compiler
| and CPU bugs, and just two weeks ago or so I deeply regretted
| assuming something to be a CPU bug in an obscure part of it
| towards the end of a lengthy bug investigation, after the
| gathered data clearly suggested it was the CPU misbehaving. It
| still wasn 't: I missed a crucial half-sentence in the spec.
| danuker wrote:
| The analogy is fun. If you believe something false, everything
| you build upon it is also questionable (though not necessarily
| false - it might be true for other reasons).
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Beginners need some (although leaky) abstractions to start
| from, otherwise they will be unable to make decisions at all.
| This is why asking questions as a beginner is really important.
|
| Trying to think of knowledge as house of cards is stupid
| because it somehow implies that knowledge is inherently
| unstable, which is not true.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The point is, it _is_ unstable if it 's wrong. Almost all
| "knowledge" is a simplification of reality anyway, so it
| still holds even if it's more right than wrong.
| ben_w wrote:
| Philosophically, all knowledge has the Agrippa/Munchhausen
| trilemma: everything must ultimately rely on itself
| (circular reasoning), infinite regression (which can't be
| fully enumerated), or assertions that are not further
| justified (dogmatism).
| kurthr wrote:
| I guess I'd go the other way and say that all abstractions
| are leaky... except perhaps abstract math? At least more CS
| folks have started to realize that not only are their
| libraries useful, but questionable... so are their floats,
| their compilers, their databases, their OSes, instruction
| caches, RAMs, etc. Knowing the boundaries of your abstraction
| is crucial!
|
| The key is knowing where your abstraction is likely to break
| down and having some bounds checking and fault tolerance to
| deal with to makes things robust. At the same time having
| abstractions (or models for Engineers and Physicists) that
| are all encompassing tends to make them so complex that they
| aren't very useful or even comprehensible.
|
| To the extent that knowledge is a model for how the world
| works that we can hold in our heads and reason about... the
| usefulness of the model is often inverse to the accuracy
| outside of its bounds. Including general rel or quantum
| effects in most earthly trajectories is so complex and
| useless that it's silly... and yet at the same time we "know"
| newtonian mechanics is "wrong".
|
| I'd be happier to say that I know how to build a robust house
| of cards for the situation. That I know there are gaps in the
| foundation, and I know when it's important to fill them in,
| and how much. At the same time, stress testing, realizing
| fundamental dependencies, and knowing how things can fail
| often just comes from experience.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >Trying to think of knowledge as house of cards is stupid
| because it somehow implies that knowledge is inherently
| unstable, which is not true.
|
| Not to be a pedant, but actually to be a pedant : Are you
| sure? I think the list of absolutely true things 200 years
| ago and the list of absolutely true things now are probably
| pretty divergent!
| fernandohur wrote:
| Nassim Taleb's Black Swan is also a great read on the
| instability (or in his words, fragility) of knowledge. A
| single observation is quite often enough to break what has
| been considered solid knowledge for years.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, you also have to discern between individual bits of
| knowledge and systems knowledge when considering systems
| stability.
|
| You can have complete knowledge of a component, but that
| may not be helpful when attempting to determine the
| affect of that component in a system where you have
| incomplete knowledge of other components.
|
| Nonlinear systems that trigger at thresholds are a good
| example of this.
| pintxo wrote:
| Card houses can be quite stable though:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F6j4e1C4Zk
| percent wrote:
| The object is not the true form of knowledge - the post is
| about a person's knowledge in the context of debugging
| layered systems.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| Anyone cannot see the picture in dark mode?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Richard Feynman said
| at one point something about how creating theories is easy, the
| hard part is making sure your new theory matches every single
| other theory out there.
| chazeon wrote:
| The physics research today is exactly like that. I have to
| compare against like tens of experiments to demonstrate that my
| theory about a single thing is alright. But experiments gets to
| publish on better journals LOL.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Very relevant:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
| ep103 wrote:
| Also known as why the field of economics is so bad at
| predicting the future xD
| danuker wrote:
| A signal I've stumbled upon recently:
|
| http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/the-single-
| gre...
|
| https://financial-charts.effingapp.com/
| branon wrote:
| The site looks all-caps to me and the image is invisible when
| using the site's dark theme.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| That explains why I was confused with the image: "why there's
| an image with just 2 arrows?"
|
| For the author: avoid using transparent background for images
| like this
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| There isn't any all-caps?
| fernandohur wrote:
| Author here: thanks for the feedback. I'm not really sure what
| you mean by all-caps, would you mind elaborating?
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| As another poster mentioned, regardless of the all-caps
| issue, users cannot see the house of cards images on dark
| mode.
| branon wrote:
| Wow, weird. This is what I see: https://u.teknik.io/8OVet.png
|
| Firefox 100, Ubuntu. Something might be wrong with my system
| because it happens in Chrome and Edge too. I've never noticed
| this on any other site before.
|
| Works fine in FF100 on Windows though. That's pretty wild.
| fernandohur wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing. I've just setup the site
| so I think it's more likely the error is on my end. Can't
| say I know the answer but I'll try to figure it out :) and
| again, thanks for sharing the screenshot!
| protopete wrote:
| Check the "font-feature-settings" in the body style CSS.
| The "case" 1 when changed to 0 makes the text normal on
| Firefox.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I think a useful generalization of this is Mental Models [1]. As
| with all models, they might not be perfect, but some are useful.
|
| Also for the purpose of this article, I think its ok to have
| simplified or imperfect mental models of things, until we need
| more details. For example, we might think about hardware in an
| abstracted high level way, until we need to deal with low level
| programming, high performance, weird hardware bugs, etc. Being
| aware of Mental Models helps you to find your blind spots and
| work on them as necessary.
|
| [1] https://fs.blog/mental-models/
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Lasting and solid foundations are made by experiencing
|
| Doing With your hands. Seeing in reality. Getting burned with the
| soldering iron. Smelling the flux. Hearing the signals and seeing
| them on the oscilloscope. We need presence, feeling, the
| ownership of knowledge as personal experience, not vicarious
| hand-me-down accounts or diagrams.
|
| As a kid I wired up NAND gates and transistors. When it came to
| logic it felt like there was something tangible I could reach out
| and touch through tactile imagination. Building a computer from
| chips, wire-wrapping hundreds of connections to a 68000, RAM and
| EEPROM chips took a whole summer. After that I could see a data-
| bus and an address-bus. I know what they feel, and smell like. I
| got good at patching dataflow DSP because 20 years earlier I
| spent hours in the studio patching analogue synths.
|
| Descartes Error is a book by Antonio Damasio [1] that talks about
| the weakness of purely rationalist epistemology. The foundation
| is laid long before we are even aware of knowing and learning.
| That book had an influence on me to understanding cognitive
| activity as embodied.
|
| This is why we need to let kids fix bikes, fall off skateboards
| and climb trees. It's why giving them tablets and chromebooks
| instead of things that get their hands dirty is no good.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/100151-descartes-
| error...
| calebegg wrote:
| To be honest, I find those 'st' ligatures incredibly distracting.
| Is there a way to turn that feature off in Chrome?
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't see any in Chrome on a Mac. Is it a font issue?
| ncmncm wrote:
| I put quite a lot of work into getting st and ct (optional)
| ligatures into the Linux Libertine typeface. And, turned them
| on by default in my copy.
|
| And, I have my browser set to use Linux Libertine for _all_
| text, whether "serif", "sans", or whatever the page server
| said it ought to be. (Button wingdings something look odd.)
|
| So, I don't see anything odd on the page, but I do see "st"
| ligatures. Just not theirs.
|
| On my phone, where even Firefox utterly refuses to use the
| fonts it is directed to, I see ligatures in the sans-serif
| font, which is just ugly. But they do not make the sans-serif
| any worse than it always is.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| I read your comment and thought "STar Wars does it, what's the
| issue?" And then I opened tfa... The ligature doesn't even make
| sense.
|
| PS: For those who don't see it, the ligature is a circumflex
| connecting the top of the t with a serif coming out the top end
| of the s, which is even weirder because it's a sans serif font.
| pitaj wrote:
| Where are you seeing them? As far as I can tell the CSS styles
| tell the browser to use the system fonts.
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(page generated 2022-05-05 23:00 UTC)