[HN Gopher] Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
Author : lis
Score : 211 points
Date : 2025-02-18 09:36 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnsalvatier.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnsalvatier.org)
| TZubiri wrote:
| The world is complex, yes
| coliveira wrote:
| The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we
| can look there is a huge amount of detail.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| One thing I find interesting is the apparent "End of
| Greatness". It seems like the fractal nature of reality has
| both an upper and lower bound?
|
| > The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at
| roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the
| lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is
| homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the cosmological
| principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is
| apparent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...
| metalman wrote:
| Its not just the(possible) fractal nature of the universes
| structure,it is that the composition of idividual portions
| varries, and those portions react differently to the forces
| bieng exerted on them. And then at the fine level, is it the
| same to accelerated by a gravitational force, as it is to be
| accelerated by a magnetic one, of course not. We have layers
| of complexity, and it is quite beyond any imagining or
| quantifying. Luckily our aproximations will get a sandwich
| made or soup,it might be better for pondering the universe,
| as it can be stired to make little swirly fractals.
| jandrese wrote:
| Possible, but since that scale is so far outside of human
| experience it is possible there is detail there that we are
| unable to perceive using our most modern techniques.
| go_elmo wrote:
| Maybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?
| saxenauts wrote:
| 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.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| 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
| bloomingkales wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| Where's the proof that humans of opposite sex are
| intrinsically attracted to each other? I can't see it.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I read recently an article on HN that basically entropy
| (and hence increase thereof) is just a statistical model
| of uncertainty of the things we don't know. As soon as
| our understanding (of e.g. positions and velocity of
| individual molecules) increases, that what we call
| entropy, decreases. At least my understanding.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 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.)
| glenstein wrote:
| I think it can be charitably interpreted to mean, for
| everyday purposes, however much you "zoom in" on something,
| there's meaningful details at lower and lower resolutions
| until you've exhausted your focus or ability to zoom.
| lotharcable wrote:
| 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.
| bobson381 wrote:
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| ...and that's all before you get into all the other logical
| fallacies that tend to compromise one's perspective. Anything
| that requires anticipating and/or interpreting the behaviors
| of other people, or that involves accounting for risks or
| probabilities--these are especially fraught as our own
| instincts and nature actively works to warp objective
| reality.
|
| In the context of policy making (or presidential fiat, as the
| case may be), there is always the risk of mistaking what
| people should do with what they will do. A pragmatic strategy
| for success will include systems that can help to thwart the
| worst impulses of our flawed reasoning, including things like
| dispassionate peer reviewed analyses (oops) that is
| untethered by the ambitions or ideologies of individual
| people or groups (oops), a diverse array of advisory opinions
| (oops), functional checks on monolithic authority (oops), and
| mechanisms for correcting prior mistakes (fingers crossed).
|
| I think this all contributes to the phenomenon that folks
| have (a bit erroneously) associated with the Dunning-Kruger
| effect--essentially the idea that people who haven't learned
| enough to know how much they _don't_ know are dangerously
| overconfident and naive. That said, I think there is a
| tendency to assume this about others that's probably
| fallacious in and of itself. In the case of current events, I
| don't believe the individuals involved actually _care_ enough
| to have even mounted the left peak of the Dunning-Kruger
| chart, but rather are fully uninformed and unconcerned with
| much of any implications outside of their own very narrow
| ideological ends (it's probably more accurate to apply
| Dunning-Kruger to the ideology itself, or maybe the broader
| coalition of partisan cohorts who share it, than it is the
| people wielding it).
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| :(
| doug_durham wrote:
| How much of that is new detail versus repeated patterns? A good
| approximation of all human visual reality fits in a 5GB
| diffusion model.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Not true at all there's limits in terms of scale in both
| directions.
| unsui wrote:
| This 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 accommodate that complexity, to some
| degree.
|
| Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they
| work, to the extent that they are production systems.
|
| And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that
| complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge
| and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that
| the system is attuned to.
|
| And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with
| delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems
| indiscriminantly.....
|
| and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.
|
| It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who
| appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of
| comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate
| reality, warts and all.
|
| And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond
| foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises,
| evil.
| zanellato19 wrote:
| Yeah, Chesterton's Fence is simply not a principle that people
| like Elon pay attention to. Sometimes for the better, mostly
| for the worse, specially when taking over something that's
| already there.
| investguy1 wrote:
| 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 toxic to the soul.
|
| The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see
| _far_ too many people destroying their relationships with
| family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when
| there are much bigger fish to fry in one 's own garden.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.
|
| Here's a pretty large fish to fry: the breakdown of
| democracy, and a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship.
|
| This is a fish that affects everyone's gardens, like it or
| not.
| radiospiel wrote:
| > Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value
| from their government as 1800 USA?
|
| oh but certainly. Healthcare, social security, education, ...
| just to name a few
| bluGill wrote:
| The question was 28x though. Not just are you getting more
| value, but is the value 28 times more. This is not clear,
| and probably answerable. Health care is very different
| between now and 1800 (in 1800 your lifespan was measurably
| better if you didn't go to a doctor ever - this was before
| handwashing and antibiotics). Even if you compare today,
| France and the US have many differences in the current
| system and so you can argue things either way and we learn
| more about your bias than any truth (there are pros and
| cons of both systems so all conclusions). Both todays are
| very different from either in 1800, and we have no way of
| knowing how either would be different.
| gerardvivancos wrote:
| Asking the question with the provided data is too
| simplistic to even argue about.
|
| "Here's the non contextualized percentages, what do you
| think of the difference between this two percentages
| which are more than two centuries apart, and from
| different countries?"
| immibis wrote:
| Percentages don't really work like that. 56% of one
| number isn't 28 times 2% of a different number. And it's
| not even the right number. GDP measures rate of number
| flow, not rate of benefit flow, or amount of benefit.
|
| It's also noteworthy how people ask this question about
| the government but never ask it about private
| corporations.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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 agree that even the comparitively tepid protections
| offered by modern France are priceless in comparison.
|
| I think children forced to labor without pay, homosexuals
| forced into hiding, Native Americans kidnapped from their
| parents and forced into boarding schools, and any number
| of other now-protected classes would also agree.
|
| Sure, if the government only serves a small fraction of
| the population at the expense of all others, that small
| fraction can debateably get comparitively good value. But
| it sure sucks for literally everyone else.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Perception is not reality. People complain all the time.
| People will always spend the most they can get by with.
| There are people earning $million/year who have less
| spending money after paying their monthly bills (to spend
| on things like food) than others living below the poverty
| line. This is all about how they spend money, the person
| making $million/year is clearly rich, but if they are
| still having trouble making ends meet.
| jebarker wrote:
| > 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.
| kimixa wrote:
| 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.
| jebarker wrote:
| 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.
| kimixa wrote:
| 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.
| jebarker wrote:
| Ah, I see. Yes, I agree.
| zht wrote:
| yes? is this a serious question?
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
|
| Interesting that you specifically chose a covid year. In 2024
| spending was 23%. The 50 year average of spending a
| percentage of GDP is 21%.[1]
|
| Yet again, anyone who believes that we have some crazy out of
| line spending right now is in a media/propaganda echo
| chamber.
|
| And if anyone believes that hacking apart our country under
| the guise of "cutting spending" again is falling for the same
| playbook. What is being done is not at all driven by cutting
| spending, that's just the justification bring put forward -
| any amount of looking into what's being done, vs what's is
| claimed is being done makes that obvious.
|
| The echo chamber that had been created is out of control at
| this pointas somehow a significant number of people believe
| what is being said.
|
| [1]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=In%20to
| ta...
| daedrdev wrote:
| France has a massive welfare state and pension system (which
| is causing a crisis as they cant afford it in the long run).
| People probably are getting 28x more from the government than
| before those existed.
| codr7 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they're paying for it though.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That question isn't being asked, though. And if you think the
| DOGE is being transparent with this reform you are either
| naive or misinformed.
| fumar wrote:
| What are you comparing from 1800? You listed zero qualifiers?
| EGreg wrote:
| Poverty dropped tremendously in the 20th century, perhaps
| that has to do with government spending?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty
|
| There are diminishing returns, though
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Or vastly increased productivity -- that also had
| increasingly less to do with land ownership? Life used to
| suck if you didn't own land (or were one of the lucky few
| who could work as a merchant, a craftsman, a priest, a
| government official, etc). Effectively all of Europe had
| too little land for all its recorded history.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value
| from their government as 1800 USA?
|
| Very likely, yes.
|
| Who was the last person close to you that died after buying
| poisoned food?
| bbddg wrote:
| Thanks for your input "investguy1"
| vlunkr wrote:
| I'm sure there are optimizations to be made, but DOGE is
| acting like an insufferable greenie dev who wants to slash
| and burn without understanding the system or having acquired
| any wisdom about maintaining and refactoring complex systems.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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).
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is not the right question to ask. 28x is a number that
| doesn't make sense.
|
| For example, you are in a restaurant, you can drink tap water
| for free, or sparkling water for $3, is sparkling water
| infinitely better than tap water? Infinity doesn't exist in
| the real world, but the real world has plenty of people
| drinking $3 sparkling water, which tells us that the
| reasoning is broken.
|
| A more sensible reasoning would be: would you get better
| value by paying 55% (57%-2%=55%) of your income to "upgrade"
| from a 1800 US government to a 2024 France government, or you
| are better off doing something else with that money.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality
|
| No argument.
|
| But is that reality public service? Or something else?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| This is such a good post. I'm sad the blog hasn't been updated in
| years.
| djsavvy wrote:
| One of my favorite blog posts of all time.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| its a pretty great realization to come along. We are all
| stardust, but complicated bits and blobs of atoms and
| molecules.
| calimoro78 wrote:
| a.k.a "Humans are unsurprisingly such simpletons when forming
| their mental model of reality, and always oversimplify."
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| samwise135 wrote:
| Reading Ian McGilchrist's "Master and his Emissary" has been
| incredibly eye opening on this theme.
|
| Oversimplification and getting upset with the world when it
| doesn't fit your model of it is definitely a poor character
| trait --- which is nevertheless unfortunately trained and
| rewarded in our schools and much of our professional work.
|
| The world is what it is and there are some helpful
| abstractions for navigating it, but don't be upset when your
| model fails as it always will.
| bobson381 wrote:
| I was hoping this would get mentioned! I heard a podcast
| with him and was enthralled. Are his interpretations and
| outlook on this considered "valid" by the scientific
| community? I've been intrigued but curious about how
| seriously he's taken.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Indeed, often when we humans are upset about something, we
| later understand things better. Then comes that aha moment
| in which we see we were jumping to conclusions.
| majkinetor wrote:
| ~ i feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and
| willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people
| who are unpleasant to have in my life.
|
| Wow man, I like this so much. I feel it strongly
| dang wrote:
| Related. 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)
| ramon156 wrote:
| Its a yearly tradition!
| wbakst wrote:
| it's quite a good read, i'm not surprised it's been posted so
| many times!
| haburka wrote:
| Imagine 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| I 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".
| cbracketdash wrote:
| I think there is a fine balance to this. I agree that going
| through life by experiencing as much as possible is futile. But
| on the other hand, spending all your time in thought is also
| problematic since your ideas never clash with reality.
|
| E.g. see the "Open Door Policy" from Hamming's research talk:
| https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#open-door-policy
| _def wrote:
| Sounds like the woo-woo paid off
| codr7 wrote:
| Reminds me of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea :)
| richx wrote:
| This 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.
| yapyap wrote:
| 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.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| The cruelty is the point.
| dartos wrote:
| > To move the goalpost of what is acceptable
|
| Not just that. They're gish galloping the courts and the
| news.
|
| So many things, some dumb, some dangerous, some
| contradictory.
|
| The goal is to make it impossible to o keep track of what's
| going on.
| tomrod wrote:
| On reading the article before the comments, I literally was
| remembering Musk's initial descriptions of The Boring Company
| and how they were wildly forgetting or glossing over key
| details that would mean the difference between exciting leap
| forward to terrifying death trap.
|
| I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks
| have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.
| dartos wrote:
| Ignoring details has been very lucrative for Musk.
|
| Remember when he said self driving is coming next year...
| every year... since 2017
| majkinetor wrote:
| Indeed, Musk is the first and only man to ever do that.
| dartos wrote:
| Far from it!
|
| But he is by far the most successful one.
|
| At the very least the loudest successful one.
| lolinder wrote:
| Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that
| it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot
| on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd
| like to see _literally anything else_ in the other 29 slots.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Agreed. People are unhealthily obsessed with DOGE here. And
| on top of that, basically every DOGE thread turns into a
| flame war. It's extremely deleterious for the site to have
| everything collapse into DOGE talk.
| theshackleford wrote:
| If my countries institutions were being dismantled by chuds
| via dubious and unprecedented means I'd be pretty obsessed.
| cma wrote:
| Thiel was part of ycombinator for a time, current head of
| yc worked for Palantir and has been working on DOGE-related
| Curtis Yarvin type stuff, so it is likely to come up here a
| lot.
| tomrod wrote:
| It's timely, current, and surprisingly related. I see no
| issue here. See my sister comment as to why.
| cbracketdash wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| cbracketdash wrote:
| I apologize for my naievty: I guess I live in a bubble
| amrodst wrote:
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| "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 inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from
| ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to
| result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security
| partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE
| per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems circular, since your opinion, views, thoughts,
| etc., are what the opposing factions are rejecting ( or de-
| legitimizing) in the first place.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| People disagree with my opinion, therefore it's circular?
| Interesting logic.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Did you read the remainder of the comment?
|
| It seems pretty clear to me at least why it would lead to
| circular arguments.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly
| straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They
| could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're
| actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of
| other people's opinions that will make them so.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible
| "hypotheses"...?
|
| There is no such mechanism.
|
| If there was then the vast majority of political debates
| on HN wouldn't even exist.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| shawndumas wrote:
| second system syndrome
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Ahem, "blow some my way"! For fence-related matters
| Chesterton is the person to ask.
| snikeris wrote:
| > 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.
| thenobsta wrote:
| Meditation has totally helped me widen my scope and soften my
| awareness. I've found these two exercises also help me get out
| of my default mode of perception.
|
| Image Streaming[1] is a fun little exercise that has helped me
| expand my perception of things or problems. I try to do it in a
| very high dynamic range way -- where I zoom out of a scene
| describe it in detail and then zoom in a describe it in detail.
|
| There is also a fun improv exercise where you walk around
| looking at objects and calling it the wrong name. It sort of
| gets you our of default mode and you start seeing things
| 'differently' (a touch more vivid). I think the exercise is
| described in Impro by Keith Johnstone.
|
| [1]: https://winwenger.com/resources/cps-techniques/image-
| streami...
| thenobsta wrote:
| Found a link to a description of the exercise.
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-
| johnsto...
| tippytippytango wrote:
| Don't ignore any question is the strategy I've found. The
| problem is that some questions fall just below the conscious
| threshold. Meditation seems to help dredge up the questions and
| take them seriously.
| patcon wrote:
| 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 :)
| _def wrote:
| Talk to another human
| handedness wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
| henjodottech wrote:
| Thought this would reference reality being encoded in 10^120
| bits.
| karparov wrote:
| And this is one of the main utilitarian arguments for diversity
| in teams. If everybody has the same socio-cultural background,
| it's harder to leave the frame.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I wonder if this is one reason why AI seems to have scaling
| limits. If building stairs is decomposed into n-steps, and each
| of those steps is decomposed into n-steps, and you keep on
| decomposing for L levels, then each time you want an extra level
| of detail you need n-times the training data/training time.
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