Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>Chaos is just a word, created by humans to provide a human expression to another and for me it describes a system that is too complicated at the current moment in time to unravel into a deterministic system.

For what it's worth, chaos is defined to mean something specific in physics: a system that is deterministic, but where a small change in today will grow in to a very big change in tomorrow, to the point where any error in your knowledge will eventually grow in to being completely wrong. To reiterate, chaotic systems are all deterministic.

If you're not talking about the world but are instead talking about your experience of the world then chaos means whatever it means in that field of study, I guess. But if you want to understand the universe then physicists are the people you'll want to listen to, so you should know what chaos means.

View on HN

I find your last paragraph an attempt at dismissing what I wrote? The interpretation I gave is based on how physicists interpret chaos.

Chaos isn't interpreted in physics, it's defined in physics, and it happens to be deterministic by definition. Many chaotic systems have already been "unraveled in to deterministic systems," including the double pendulum and weather models.

My philosophy is everything is deterministic and how I wrote the above illustrates that with my expression of the word chaos. I don't understand your point?

In this context, a non-deterministic system is stochastic. That means there's an inherent random probability in the behavior. Chaos has no "chance"; you get the same result with the same initial conditions.

I agree with all that and I'm still confused to why the original commenter suggests my interpretation is incorrect to how I phrased chaos.

To break down the original sentence, "it describes a system that is too complicated at the current moment in time to unravel into a deterministic system," it implies that chaotic systems are not already "unraveled" into deterministic ones. The reality is that chaotic systems are all already deterministic by definition, and in fact many of them are completely "unravelled" (insofar as the equations that govern them are known.)

No, I never once implied chaos systems are not already unraveled into a deterministic one.

Me writing, "it describes a system that is too complicated at the current moment in time to unravel into a deterministic system" uses the word "unravel" as how humans are incapable of understanding all the cause & effects in the current moment of time; when they define it as chaos but may eventually be able to understand all the cause & effects.

I have no understanding to why you wrote your last paragraph in the original comment to me and how the comments transpired from then to now; other than you have a fragile ego to how I prefer to use my expression of the word chaos.

The last paragraph was written because of the use of the phrase "to me," in the original comment, motivating a defense of why it is a good idea to use what the word means to physicists, as opposed to what it means to other groups.

As you said, “it’s just a word,” and words can have several meanings. This is just one example: you gave a definition of chaos “in your philosophy,” but arguing about definitions (and philosophies) is usually pointless.

> But if you want to understand the universe then physicists are the people you'll want to listen to...

Bold claim. I would like to ask physicists what chicken tastes like? Or why the mountains are beautiful? Or where the other 73% of our existence is?

The first two are about human experiences and the last you will hear first by listening to physicists (because anyone who practices physics is by definition a physicist, I'm including astrophysicists of course). It might sound like a bold statement, but really what I said was kind of tautological.

You self scoped the question as “universe” and any field, subjective or absolute, where 3/4 of your hard problem stuff is unidentified, probably disqualifies you as a generalist expert so I think physics are the furthest from tautology as the universe and our existence can get.

It would be like a coder saying his codebase is 3/4 missing, let alone the runtime, OS, processor, being completely speculative, but then claiming to be an expert matter on computing.

No, you might very well be a micro expert relative to other micro experts in your small corner of your codebase, but on the universe of existence at large?

Perhaps some respect and humility to the whole process are due. ;)

Suppose you are studying a legacy codebase, one left to you with no documentation. You and your colleagues are by definition the only ones working on it, becuase you call anyone who is working on it a colleague. You are only 1/4th done by LOC, but it's not clear what fraction of the remaining lines are autogenerated getters and setters vs real code. Clearly anyone interested in the codebase should talk to your team.

I should also mention that the 1/4th number is comparable to a "by weight" estimate, but what physicists study is the laws of physics which are not measured in that way. Nobody on Earth knows how much physics there is left to discover or if that is even a well formed question.

I have a very healthy love for physics, and am simply attempting to draw your awareness to the complete subjectivity and awe of the universe.

To reallocate the code metaphor, at some point you step back from the monitor and realize you are certainly discovering how Photoshop was written while completely ignoring the images it creates, documenting the MP3 format, but ignoring the music, describing how the tree grows, while missing the forest.

> the complete subjectivity and awe of the universe

But it’s awe that is subjective, while the universe is completely objective.

> it’s not clear what fraction

But see https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/03/30/statistical-rule-o..., which has been discussed on HN not long ago.

That rule tells you how likely you are to see one thing given N observations, but what we don't know is how many things there are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com