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Comment by zackabaker | Hacker News Reader

> "Anthropologists are simply realizing that early cities took extremely diverse forms. "Clearly, urbanism is different in different parts of the world, and we need to be more flexible in how we define this," he explained. The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and urbanism can be very difficult to determine."

It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural history, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc we begin to reach conclusions similar to the above. Wow, this is much more complex than we thought it was. I find this in my own life as I explore socio-political topics also - it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?

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Yes, in the sense that cross-discipline study sometimes reveals common themes. One field having complex dynamics might make the world seem complicated. When many fields have the same complex dynamics, you start to wonder if there's something simple you can tease out of it.

Are you sure your digging deep enough? I have seen plenty of cases where different fields seemed to share a theme. But, the details always diverged on closer inspection, limiting the value of the comparison.

To stretch an analogy stacking blocks seems like you can add the heights, except the weight of the stack deforms them, so addition is misleading.

At some level one can think of anything as unique, but it's often more useful to consider in what way two (or many) things are similar.

We've got a bit of a dialectic:

Thesis -- The map is not the territory.

Antithesis -- There's nothing so practical as a good theory.

Synthesis -- Use a subway map when catching the train, use a topographical map when doing flood planning, etc.

Taking it back to programming, all abstractions are leaky in some way. A good software engineer uses the right abstraction for the task, knowing that it might be wrong for a different task.

Human themes (archaeology, art, architecture, urban development, etc) share the commonality of the human. As we learn more about general themes driving our psyche and human groups general themes start to emerge. Of course, the emergent behavior of human societies is really complex. I like Noel Harari's "Sapiens" as he really strives to find the high level themes in humanitys development.

IMO, if a topic sounds overtly complex and focuses on a legion arbitrary seeming minutiae and, most crucially, you can't find the empiric or mathematical root cause for this complexity it's likely the direction of study is more or less bogus and based on academic eminence rather than evidence.

Urban development really is it's own thing dominated by transportation systems, wealth, waste management etc. The complex math is vital and independent from other human constructs. Architecture was often influenced by the tax code, climate, material property's etc so again the details really are important and separate from everything else.

Now, sure the boundarys around a field gets fuzzy and sculpture and architecture are both influenced by the human visual system so there is overlap. But, that's not a shared theme that's D.C. and Baltimore being next to each other and sharing a few suburbs at one end, but not all suburbs.

Example: kelvin-helmholtz instabilities, applicable in dynamics ranging from vascular systems to cloud formations to interstellar nebulae, and so much more.

> this is much more complex than we thought it was. > it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?

This is the very tension between Platonism with its emphasis on unity and Aristotelianism which sees complex diversity everywhere. How can we get these two systems to work together? How can we have both unity and diversity?

And now you know where the word "university" comes from.

(Who says all those history and philosophy classes were a waste of time? Besides me, I mean.)

>> How can we have both unity and diversity?

I've always seen things as having a 'level of abstraction'. At one level of abstraction things can have unity, but as you 'zoom in' and change the level of abstraction you'll see the differences and have diversity.

From a distance stars and snowflakes all look the same, but not on closer inspection. Similarly in a foreign country, at first people will all seem the same, but as you spend more time there you level of abstraction changes and you start to see greater diversity.

Since you can zoom in/out infinitely there's no correct level of abstraction to start from or accept as a default, therefore things have great unity and diversity, simultaneously.

Superpositions!

It has happened in the history of science that people found an elegant theory unifying seemingly disparate phenomena. Or, while learning a subject, it may seem really complicated and confusing, and later, once you have learned it, it may seem simple. But I'm not sure if you would count either of these examples. Can you provide a description of what a counterexample might look like even if it is made up?

_The more you learn, the less you know_ --ancient wisdom

Its so true in physics at least.

Sort of.

While I studied engineering, it was common to get in spats with lefty liberal-arts types, who always brought everything around to talk of class, rich vs. poor, and so on. I mainly read The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on, so I thought this perspective was reductionist and overly simplistic, when reality was much more complex, a mostly net-beneficial process where foul-play was a relatively minor factor.

After graduation, when I started working, I had time to read more history and philosophy, learned more about my own domain of expertise, learned how the professional world worked, and also caught up with much more current events. Turns out I now feel like those critics were more-or-less right all along.

I still have issues with the way some issues were introduced to me originally, but ultimately I was just very reluctant to accept that there was basically a full-on class war I was blissfully ignorant of.

My experience coming from very disenfranchised community and going to a good school was that there is class warfare and it is a big deal, and the amount of people I know who got jail time for car and housing fines is depressing and disgusting yet the college liberal group still go overboard with thinking everything is racism and classism.

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