Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
johnsalvatier.org
johnsalvatier.org
The money quote from the article: "I’ve learned that the correct way to build a house is to design the handrail first, then design the stair, and the rest of the house will follow."
Part of the reason you don't notice the complexity of everyday things is that humans have spent thousands of years perfecting the details and methods that let you take your stairs and handrails for granted. And, like, 90% of everything else.
The McMaster-Carr catalog isn't >2" thick because they're trying to confuse you. It's that thick because everything they sell solves a different problem, that somebody worked out the details in years ago, and we live in a world where the experience and solutions embodied in every part gets mass produced and delivered the next day for the cost of mere money.
And then there are manufactured handrail parts, which are a grotesque and simplified perversion of a properly carved handrail (discussed in the link). But at least regular people can afford a handrail for their stairs for safety too.
[0] https://www.thisiscarpentry.com/2009/07/15/drawing-a-volute/
If they were right, it still wouldn't solve the problem analysis problem, but it would certainly help out the parts problem. It would also help move software into a professional engineering phase.
Software is half a century old, we are still using flint to produce it. The only reason it looks fancy is because it makes more sparks, and a lot faster.
If you look at the history of chemistry, mechanical engineering, or astronomy then you kind of get the impression that we're probably 150-300 years away from software development working the way everyone already imagines it working.
The Data Revolution is like going from the bronze age to the iron age.
It will get industrialized eventually, but that time frame will take much longer and will look completely different from what you expect.
If it is to happen, a serious plateauing of "progress" will need to happen all the way up the layers of the tech stack to the point where app developers or data engineers are now working with tools stable enough that previous generations would at least recognise let alone even be able to work with.
Engineering maturity "nirvana" for software will happen not by us getting more experienced/better at it, but by "progress" stalling in all the tools we use.
Software changes a lot basically because it is easy to change. And because we as an industry value constant work towards making it even easier to keep changing - eg cloud, containers, devops, agile etc etc
In the physical world, things have stabilised and reached a kind of local optimum across the vast majority of areas. Sure there are still incremental improvements happening, and occasional revolutionary improvements in different areas. Mostly the main bits being radically changed are the bits that coincidentally touch computers downstream from the constant churn happening to software.
Also another factor is when I think of physical engineering (and I used to work in civil/structural engineering in the 90s), for nearly all work going on, the scale of the problems being solved hasn't changed. Most building sites are the same size they were, most materials are the same, some regulations have changed, but ubiquitous CAD tools etc seems to be the major change.
So maybe, when we can't make transistors smaller, and we can't make cpus faster, and can't increase memory or storage things will slow down. eg as each layer up the stack plateaus, each layer above it eventually changes from working on new capabilities to making what it already does more efficient, that will eventually (it will take a while) bubble all the way up. Progress slows down a lot and us end developers and engineers are working on a stable set of tools very much in a local (or even global) optimum. Also maybe when/if the worlds population stabilises (in decades/centuries/whenever), that might lead to an eventual limit on how much user data can be mined from people and the scale of the data we deal with might stabilise too even beyond the limit reached where we've stopped collecting more because of capacity limits talked about above.
Heh, I started off trying to disagree with your quoted statement by saying I don't think it would ever stabilise like other disciplines. But by laying out one way it could happen, I think I may have ended up agreeing with you :)
"Data abstraction is impossible."
You can abstract an algorithm. Like, how you sort. Merge sort, bubble sort, etc. Normally it doesn't matter to the rest of the code, you just want a sorted list. You can abstract a type or an object. Hey, given some type T and some function T -> int, you can get an int.
You CAN'T abstract a chunk of data which has semantically distinct members inside of it. If someone sends you a structure that has a field in it called "name", then you have no idea what that actually means. You have to get them to tell you what they mean by "name". The hard part being that inevitably "name" means one thing unless the "aux" field is set to a number that evenly divides the "misc" field at which point "name" has to be filtered by some arcane rules.
This is why we have lists like "falsehoods programmers believe about time|names|etc". Time means different things for different applications. Names mean different things to different contexts and cultures. You have to find someone to tell you what all of the individual pieces of the object's internals means to them.
no-code will probably see some success in niche domains where things have been fixed for years. Ultimately, many applications will need hand written code to handle all of the meaningful sub-components of the data being interacted with.
That's an amazing point. It explains where the object oriented proponents of decades past went wrong in thinking there would be vendors for "Car" or "Employee" objects.
You can use a Point from any vendor, without caring if it has x and y, or r and theta, or some other representation inside, as long as it correctly implements the specified interface.
Not to mention, if you want to serialize Point, then you have to know what its internals look like and what they mean. There is no data abstraction.
[Okay, so when you serialize Point, you can also serialize all code that will ever do anything with point. However, we generally don't do this (partially because of security issues). But it doesn't really help that much because whatever the serialized code produces when run has to be some datatype where do understand the semantic meanings behind its internals.]
Data abstraction would be getting some arbitrary Point object and then being able to look into the internals and do the right thing. Whether it's x and y or r and theta.
Now you might say, "that's just bad programming if you do that," but the point is that often times we don't have a choice in the matter because either of the constraints of the project OR because the "do the right thing" part interacts with non-code.
So for example, if you want to send your Point over the network, then you either 1) Need to know the internals, what they mean, and how they work or 2) have to send along code for the remote device to execute to handle your custom internals. Case 2 is generally not done (and presents some security issues regardless).
But this isn't just a technical issue. Names are notoriously difficult because data abstraction doesn't exist. How many first, middle, and last names does someone have? Is there a canonical ordering for the names? Does someone always have a name? What do the prefixes mean? What do the postfixes mean? These questions and more all have to do with what you're trying to use the name for AND what culture the name comes from. There is nothing you can do to abstract away the problem of names. And if you try you'll just end up with a lot of messy, complex code, that breaks all the time.
For car object: Tesla, Ford, GM
For employee object: Randstad, Kelly, Trueblue
Much better implementation than the C++ one, too.
But if you want to do something more complicated... it breaks down. Imagine trying to write software to do things with a generic "Transmission" interface. All the complicated logic would still be the responsibility of the vendor so you would be out of luck trying to come up with something more granular than "check_status()" and "repair(parts: List<Object>)" as an interface. Which is so limited as to be pointless.
Data abstraction is hard and many people are no good at it, but it's not impossible; it can't be, because it's required.
don't think of data abstraction as one and done, think of it as a process. Maintaining (as in, maintenance-ing rather than obeying) your data abstractions as you make modifications to code is the key to clean code, it's where the real refactoring takes place.
if your brain works like mine does, it is paralyzing to work on code without data abstractions, like always thinking of a staircase as all of its component parts rather than as a staircase
For example suppose you have a program with configuration. You might have a "ConfigurationProvider" and abstract that with an "IConfigurationProvider" and mock implementations of that interface for unit tests.
Or you could simply define a Plain Old Data structure with fields for the configuration data. Then you can construct an instance of that data structure in different ways as appropriate.
The key idea there is: "data" is something that's already automatically decoupled from where the data came from. For code you have to do work to achieve that decoupling, and it will always leak.
Imagine if you needed to write C structs in Nginx or Postgres corresponding to all the business objects and data types they’re going to touch. Worse, imagine you need to thread them through all the implementation!
Many business applications are written that way. I think there are opportunities on the table to stop doing it.
They all do the same type of thing, but that isn't abstracting data. That's abstracting the population of data or the serializing of it.
However none of that is ever going to know that the name field needs to strip out the first three characters, rot 13, and then parse as a guid.
Someone still needs to know what the data you're getting means. And there's no way to shake that.
Although people do try and then we get lists like: things programmers don't understand about names.
What no-code people miss is that by the time a piece of functionality is available as a no-code widget, it's been available as a library for years. No-code solutions will never replace developers. They instead free up developer time, allowing them to create more niche or more technically challenging things.
Wix and other website builders have completely replaced developers who make static HTML pages, but those developers have moved on to making more complex things with React and canvas and WebSockets.
Business requirements grow to match these advances. Twenty years ago, an independent store was ahead of its time if it had a website. Today, a store without online shopping - or at least an online catalog with stock information - is at risk. No-code solutions will never be enough, because competitors will use no-code and also pay developers to code better functionality.
I was a resident computer nerd there, so one of my projects was adapting a 5-axis CNC router to rough out these tangent rails. We were successful to some degree, but the fixturing and programming for individual tangent sections was very complex. It worked out that the CNC approach was only economical when the design of the stair required many multiples (rare in our case). Otherwise the skill and adaptability of individual craftsman was much more efficient, and the CNC was relegated to constructing jigs or 2D pieces.
My training was in high-end artisan furniture making, and the design challenges I saw in custom stairs were way more complex than almost any other field of woodworking I am familiar with, including the more technically avant-garde furniture makers. The only clear exception is wooden boat building, which appropriately enough was the background of many of my coworkers at that company.
I feel that there is a deep similarity in the kind of problem-solving and craftsmanship that fine woodwork and software development both require. I’m convinced some of my (minimal) skills I developed working with my father in woodworking and metal work translates to a better ability to visualize complex systems.
Boat building is a great example of the phenomenon the OP talks about. I agree it’s particularly challenging, mostly because nothing is planar. You could spend a lifetime exploring the nuances of stitch-and-glue plywood construction, or bead and cove cedar strip, vacuum-bagging fiberglass, etc. In wooden boats, projects are measured in decades…
mere money? talk about overlooking a piece of remarkable complexity
Knowledge is not. Spending 20 years mastering piano will do little good if you need to build a staircase.
Shit, spend a couple years learning how to build furniture and then go build a chicken coop. There's shockingly little overlap between those two skill sets! That's not a hypothetical. There's a lot of knowledge that your body learns that doesn't come into play doing carpentry.
the fungibility of money is similar to the idea that all the steps in a staircase should be the same height.
Wrong framing. "Mere money" because we virtually all have money, there are many ways to make it, and the possession of it does not encapsulate any skillset or knowledge; exchanging it for access to artifacts generated with a massive knowledge repository is like trading sand for glass.
If you want to understand the value of “soft skills” like communication, it’s right here.
Being able to understand that there are different points of view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost anyone.
Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience.
> Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience.
This strikes me as highly ironic given the incredible narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses over recent years. Try seriously challenging the doctrine and one is liable to be cancelled, reprimanded, chucked off a course - even physically attacked.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
This is a disingenuous attempt to dismiss a valid criticism by categorising it as a flame-war topic.
The humanities today, in general, are by no means either tolerant or open (at least in the English speaking portion of the globe).
Critics in this area have latched on to a few prominent outliers or bad actors and used that to create a false narrative about the entire system.
I think, though it is a leap, that the current <insert-dogma-of-the-day> will extend downstream but who knows...
The categories of thought which underpin a humanistic education are denied (a priori), except insofar as they are immediately useful to material well-being. The importance of contemplation of the truth is relativized downwards, and thought must justify itself in terms of action: social change, market value, “impact”, etc., which is all another way of saying that truth is made an instrument power[0]. We are living the consequences.
In this light, it becomes apparent that the crisis crosses contested political boundaries (although it is admittedly progressives who currently have the upper hand). The main beneficiaries are, as one might expect, the powerful.
[0]: some may reply that truth has always been a socially constructed instrument if power, and that announcing it as such is simply a reduction in hypocrisy. This criticism must be reversed upon the critic: the proposition is itself a construct only believable in a social idiom which made it so.
I don't think this is right at all. First, positivism is dead. Michael Polanyi killed it (I forget the name of the book at the moment).
Second, when people complain about "the incredible narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses", they don't mean that only positivist voices are allowed. And those doing the narrowing aren't doing so from a positivist position at all. They're doin so from a position that regards positivism as an attempt by a power structure to assert dominance (and probably racist besides).
I like Polanyi, but positivism is still very much alive. I mentioned in my post various failed attempts to surpass it, in which I would include Pragmatism, continuations of Marxism, the critical school (excluding some late works by Horkheimer), and postmodernism, all of which retain positivism’s negations.
EDIT: to supply some evidence, in Book III of Science, Faith, and Society, Polanyi argues that unchecked Positivism would result in a society not fundamentally dissimilar from the Soviet society which had prompted him to write the book in the first place. I encourage you to read it and compare it against your experience, asking whether Polanyi secured victory, or whether crucial aspects of his thought went unheeded.
1. Polanyi's criticism: Human observers are not objective. They start with their own biases. That means that any observations of events cannot be 100% trusted as a source of truth.
2. Francis Schaeffer's criticism: Within the structure of positivism, there is no way to know that what you observe is actually data. It has no basis for saying that it should be data.
3. Greg Koukl's criticism: Since positivism is a set of statements in epistemology, and not either direct observation or true by pure logic, positivism says that you can't know that positivism is true. It is self-inconsistent.
Positivism "alive" only by inertia. The position doesn't need to be "surpassed" by something, it only needs to be refuted in a way that can't really be answered - and it has been.
Anyway, none of that was my main point. My main point was that it's not positivism that is driving the closing of minds and narrowing of discourse on campuses.
Is it? At least in the US, I'm not sure what progressive political victories compare with, say, the long-lasting effects of the Trump administration, especially in the judicial area. More broadly, many progressive causes have been getting weaker in US politics for decades. How many of the places that enacted strong rent control decades ago would be able to do so today, for instance, vs those where it's been weakened?
Perhaps we might agree that progressivism as a political movement has not succeeded in separating economic from social liberalism?
At the same time that conservatism (in the US) evolved from being more focused on economic conservatism to a mixture, and sometimes a focus on, social conservatism.
I'm not sure this is true. Opposition to this sort of thing has given the world leaders like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. In the case of Trump, even losing the election was extremely close and the political movement he catalyzed continues unabated and, perhaps, more entrenched.
But I could be wrong: in general it is hard to make an accurate assessment here when the most accessible views into either side are the more extreme outliers that bubble up into the front pages or morning news shows of different news outlets, or pluck the right chord of anger/indignation to trend in social media.
But his other post, 'submission and dominance among friends,' had more impact on me. Connecting our behavior to our mammal relatives like he does is not exactly novel, but combined with his frankness about his own needs -- especially the profoundly uncool desire to be "on the submissive end of this kind of clear status play" -- the piece was revelatory for me. Perhaps you'll enjoy: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
That's a very brittle position. Better to have some buffer and then you're able to turn away jobs you don't like. Maybe you leave 10% on the table, but if times get lean you don't want all of your prospects to dry up because "That guy charges way too much".
But, it would also follow, that the version of reality that you experience is not very rich in detail relative to whatever is "real."
The author, John, says that blindness to detail can make you "intellectually stuck." So I would wonder if an implication of Sean Carroll's argument, an implication of the universe as a simulation, is that we would experience less detail and therefore be more prone to getting "stuck".
The only observable thing would be a "detail snap" and the same "high-res" details were the same hash is produced. Which could be avoided by hashing in the observer, at some level of detail.
0: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-w...
We do 2D simulations, games of life, etc. If our universe is simulated, why wouldn't the "parent" one be vastly more complex (more dimensions) and a much better place to run simulations?
It could be highly hyperdimensional and contain unimaginable levels of detail, even "time" in our universe could be a construct (or multidimensional) in the parent universe.
Even seemingly simple problems run into surprising issues when you want arbitrary precision. What’s the one’s place digit of π^(π^(π^π)? I mean sure you could fake unlimited zoom by just picking arbitrary numbers like say 4, but that’s no longer zoom.
It’s an interesting theory though but I’m not quite sure I buy the detail resolution argument as the one that defeats it, rather similar to Descartes in that you can’t trust your senses it’s hard to care about, especially with no proposed test (which wouldn’t the test be part of the simulation too?). So you kind of run into the “well who created that kind of marathon and I don’t know of any philosophical conjectures that have those characteristics that have been solved. Could be wrong though.
I largely agree with where you're at on this. What we experience as normal might be extremely low detail relative to some more detailed underlying reality.
However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. So it seems like there's room to go "further down".
I also don't necessarily think it's a decisive argument, but what's interesting to me is that argument in particular stresses detail, and what it has in common with this article leads to an implication that we're more likely to get "stuck" in a cognitive sense, so that there are shapes to our thinking that correspond to the level of detail we're able to experience.
Do we? I'm not trying to do the Socratic Method here with endless questioning but how can I know or experience what less detail means? Don't I only have access to all of the detail I could have access to by definition?
When I think about resolution I'm kind of imagining things that aren't measurable by us at all or possible to experience, because if we can measure them or experience them then they are part of our "resolution" sphere I'd think?
It's definitely interesting to think about. I'd love to get your thoughts and those of others too.
If you buy into the bootstrapping premises (which I don't!) that simulations beget more simulations, and that this runs into limits of computing power, there are clear and consistent principles driving that runaway process.
However, so far as I can tell, it's not clear that there would be any principle leading us to conclude that there would be a standardization of simulations relating to image hashing or fiddling with the experience of time. Those types of fixes would fall into the category of idiosyncratic details that either would or wouldn't hold in particular one-off scenarios, and don't generalize into any transcendant probabilistic implication that such experiences are most likely. That kind of generalization is what would be necessary for it to be responsive to the argument about simulations.
I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to check if this makes sense. My wild imagination suggests that 'waveform collapse' could be modeled as the result of a simulation being forced to resolve a state of a specific particle for further calculations. I imagine it is hard to come up with a plausible 'simulation model' for this that includes features like probability wave interference and entanglement of particles.
Such a model would be amazing for insight into quantum mechanics, and also have far-reaching consequence for metaphysics. It would strengthen the argument for us living in a simulation, if the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can be modeled as artifacts of a particularly efficient emulation.
That's not just because we can't access them, but because a superuniverse system assumes a coherent set of metalogic that makes certain universe features possible and other features impossible/unlikely
Not only can we not access that, there's absolutely no justification for generalising from this universe to any metasystem in any way.
Especially if you accept the premise that this simulation has less detail than the original. Because then of course you don't know what detail is missing, or what detail is possible.
So that argument nicely destroys itself.
These are all similar to the epistemological arguments of unknowable truths. Interesting but ultimately fruitless.
Ridiculous! It's much more probable that our universe is a game of Factorio being played by an idiot.
So your argument is Genesis 1:27? "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them"
Big, if true.
But supposing there were some reason to run one in a universe with no constraint (impossible, since even having a reason to run a simulation is itself a constraint), would the simulation have any constraints at all? I don't see a reason why. Infinite compute available to simulate everything all at once would be trivial.
So we can then deduce that a universe in which a simulation is running has constraints. We do not know what these constraints are, but we can be certain they exist.
Some of the constraints within the simulation, unbeknownst to the entities inside the simulation, are the constraints of the universe in which it is running, and not constraints imposed by the simulation itself. Which constraints are these? Well, it would stand to reason that these constraints would appear to be fundamental. Maybe in ours it's the speed of light demonstrating the compute limit of the simulation. Maybe our simulation exists to better understand their constraints, and so something much more difficult to understand is indicative of their constraints. Maybe those constraints are reason itself. Maybe the fact that the process of the universe unfolding is indicative of their constraints. Maybe something else, maybe I'm wrong and its something that doesn't appear fundamental at all, but it doesn't really matter. Information leaks into your universe from the universe in which it exists. No matter the nature of the "bare metal" universe in which your universe is running, there will always be some aspect of yours that is reflective of the higher level one, and there will always be a way to tell that you are in a simulation. All that is needed is to examine the details of how yours works, hand wavy and much harder than it sounds, but theoretically it is possible. You cannot create a simulation in which the entities inside cannot possibly know they're in one, and in which nothing at all can be known of the higher reality.
1) speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit
2) wave/particle duality
3) conservation of energy - everything is eternal, nothing can be truly created or destroyed
4) quantum entanglement shows that reality is non-local
5) singularities at center of black holes where seemingly all physical laws break down
e.g. for #2 wave/partical duality (which isn't necessarilly even a thing, depending on what foundation of QM you subscribe to) he says that everything is energy and that energy is light; this is not correct (the 2nd part)
for #3 energy is not necessarily conserved over long time frames in our universe
#4 depends on which foundation of QM you subscribe to, but doesn't necessarily require non-locality (AIUI, if your foundation results in this problem, then you must chose between locality or reality to explain things - reality in this context not really meaning what it might mean in common parlance)
#5 singularities appear in black holes because the maths breaks down because we don't have a unified theory of QM+gravity; they aren't magical. Also the big bang wasn't a singularity in the way he seems to be implying, again AIUI
I'm no expert, but I would suggest you review some more technical videos before reading too much into the link you posted (I suggest PBS Space Time / FermiLab / Sabine Hossenfelder)
Separately, how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? We all do sometimes-- how would we ever know if it's more or less than "normal" in an non-simulated universe?
Carrol is a physicist so he may have more technical reasoning grounded in physics-- I don't know-- but it sounds like a rhetorical rather than scientific justification.
I never said we aren't prone to getting stuck, in fact I was trying to suggest the opposite although maybe I wasn't very clear.
A possible implication of being in a simulation, if we are in one, is that maybe we're more likely to get "stuck."
That possibility was the very connection between this article and Sean Carroll's argument that led me to make my comment.
The entire idea is a counterfactual with absolutely no way of evaluating it as evidence for the opinion that we're not simulated. It may even be true that successive layers if embedded universes would have more problems of that sort, but we still lack any way to establish that our own rate is the baseline. Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation.
Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out what the terms mean. Of course it's difficult to reason in cases with vague terms.
Where I part with you is in the conclusion you draw from the vagueness. You rattle off a string of questions, to each of which my response would be along the lines of "good question! How we answer that depends on XYZ, I think this is more likely, this is less likely. In this case you do this, in that case you do this other thing, etc."
For me, those kinds of questions are prompts that allow you continue a constructive conversation in a spirit of good faith and intellectual curiosity. It's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it, and all that. But you don't seem to want to have the questions engaged with or answered so much as you want to use them in a performative expression of helplessness to show that the whole exercise is doomed. To me that's skipping about 3, 4, or 5 steps in the middle.
>Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation.
Again, you're chasing ghosts. Before you said "how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck?" when I had never suggested we are not prone to getting stuck. Now you're saying can't "be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation." I agree! It is speculative. Where is this disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're responding to coming from?
I knew you could change boiling point with pressure but is this suggesting that doing something like having a layer of oil on top of an ambient pressure pot of water would prevent boiling? I tried googling for some elaboration but only found discussions of superheating water via pressure changes.
(Although making anything stay at specified dimensions from Home Depot "fresh from the tree" lumber is difficult. That is why kiln-dried lumber exists.)
Wooden boat tension joinery - now that's hard. You need the results of several centuries of puzzle-solving and dealing with the effects of water to do that well.
There was some article a few years back on HN about two incompetents trying to build a cabin in the woods, with too little experience, too little planning, and too much drinking. Their worst mistake is that they didn't know that you build roof trusses at ground level. (Or just buy them prebuilt.) Then hoist completed trusses into place. They were trying to stick-build roof trusses up in the air at roof level. That did not end well.
This stuff isn't rocket science. There are books easily available, and lots of people who've done it before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 (2020; 115 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 (2018; 296 comments)
Life has infinite levels of depth if you keep peeling back layers and look down a bit further. And when you think you know something, dig deeper and you realize you know less than you thought.
if one can accept this, then one can accept that any perceptions about reality he may have can only be at best a "useful model," and such models should be constantly updated in response to new data and observations. of course, this means that there is quite a bit of incentive in deliberately shaping the models people use to perceive reality...
> Because we cannot observe space beyond the edge of the observable universe, it is unknown whether the size of the universe in its totality is finite or infinite. Estimates suggest that the whole universe, if finite, must be more than 250 times larger than the observable universe. Some disputed estimates for the total size of the universe, if finite, reach as high as 10^10^10^122 megaparsecs, as implied by a suggested resolution of the No-Boundary Proposal. [1]
Secondly, rays (the geometric construct that have a point origin and extend infinitely in one direction) are infinitely long, but any point on them is finitely far away from the end. Why couldn't the universe be the same way -- unbounded in one direction (of scale), but bounded in the other?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size_and_regions
I mention this because "Lost Art Press" is currently on the front page, who are an independent woodworking book publisher near the front of this movement
Not that even if I did know what I was missing I would make the effort, heh.
That isn't much of a revelation? Although it seems like plenty of startups looking to disrupt something run headlong into the issue.
Anyway, I think a more proper title is something like "Everything is More Complicated That it Looks"
https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
I have learned that a universal unavoidable element to any model is that it oversimplifies the thing it is trying to explain. Sometimes that is OK and using the model we gain useful insight into a system. Other times the simplification of the model ruins its explanatory power. Academics can sometimes forget this I think in their eagerness to understand and explain things. Some models that have varying degrees of usefulness are the following: Newton's F=ma, supply and demand economics, Marxism vs capitalism, colonialism, post modernism, globalism vs nationalism, conservatism vs liberalism. We have to be very careful applying an overly simplistic model to complex phenomena. Sometimes our desire to understand something at a high level erodes our ability to understand it at all, especially when modeling human behavior where interactions fundamentally occur at the level of the individual.
Colonialism in my mind is a good example of this. We have a model (a simplification of reality) that says this is a specific time period in human history in which people groups migrated between areas trampling on indigenous cultures in the process. The reality is that this has happened since the dawn of civilization and will continue, that some colonists at some times respected the native peoples and the movement was mutually beneficial. I believe colonialism as a model has limited usefulness and it's much more useful to look at specific movements of peoples and what happened as a result.
A specialist can suffer from the law of instrument for analogous reasons. If you put an immunologist in charge of policy, he may reduce the common good to merely those things with immediate and obvious immunological relevance to him. Sure, freedom from infection is important to the common good, but it isn't the only thing and indeed optimizing for that in excess incurs an enormous cost to the common good.
Our education system, sadly, does not prepare us in foundational ways to reason and understand properly and this lack of intellectual and moral discipline can manifest in fixations (undisciplined passions, like in this case fear, can produce these fixations).
Basically, I get his point, but I think he chose a really poor example to illustrate it. All I'm hearing from this guy is: "I've never actually had to build stairs."