The truth is always made of details | Hacker News Reader

The truth is always made of details

raptitude.com

204 pointsherbertl72 comments

I love this, but I also feel they're valorizing the high resolution simply because it's their particular interest.

In some fields, what they are speaking about is called "fine-graining". Looking up at the bigger picture is called "coarse-graining". Moving up and down between the levels, and bringing learnings between levels, that's where the work is. No one place of focus is better, as each environment can always change. Attention exists to hopefully guide us to the right level. I'd say we're not "built for high-res", because it's the moving between that keeps our attention from getting stuck at one specific level of abstraction :)

There's a great quote by supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that feel related to the crux of this stuff:

> For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.

The "simplicity on the other side of complexity" is the coarse-grained explanation, the abstraction, that has done the complex consideration to collapse the appropriate aspects. We only need to fine-grain our attention to understand that appropriate reduction for the given situation we're trying to grok. But the low-res is no less noble than the high-res, so long as you or someone else has done the hard work of finding the right abstraction... :)

I don't think the article is valorising the detail view at all, only to highlight the lack of appreciation and neglect of the ability to move down the layers as opposed to moving up.

Higher level abstractions tend to be not grounded. When we operate on abstractions, we also tend to move up and lose the capability to execute on the lower layers. It results in a lot of inefficiencies and presents new failure scenarios.

It sounds like we perhaps agree on most of the important things. I'm with you on new failures at each level of focus. Again, moving between feels the value. Any specific level will have failures, and only spreading attention across all levels can helps us hit a minimum -- probably never zero, because then we'd be gods in the territory :)

The map is not the terrain. Any map, coarse grained or fine grained has its place, they maybe be useful. But neither are actually the terrain. Even software models aren't the real thing.

This is a great hacker news meme, but a map is still obviously useful.

To analyse the map, its author and its purpose, is just as useful as getting into the weeds and understanding the terrain.

What use would knowing the terrain be if you can’t share your mental model of it with someone else?

I'd go further. If you think you understand the terrain in itself, all you've really done is make a more detailed map. You can ask the terrain questions, but you can never understand it or predict it or do anything useful with it except by making a map.

"The map is not the terrain" is useful if you're in danger of throwing away evidence that challenges your favourite model, in all other cases it distracts attention from the fact that building models is essential and important.

Yeah, but then it's like «All models are wrong, some are useful.» that already presupposes that you are aware of that models are unavoidable ?

This runs the danger of mistaking a map for a mental model. Which, for some of us, I bet that is the case. For others? I don't know.

Note that this is emphatically not saying to abandon maps. I'm pushing more for having things in addition. And if you really want to build a shared mental model, you almost certainly have to share an experience. You can use narratives to help build a shared experience, but often you have to practice/rehearse anything that you want to have a truly shared model of.

Paradoxically, this oversimplification summarizes the spirit of the article very well, and also completely sidesteps the parent's incredibly valid counterpoint.

The original quote is about war and combat where it does make perfect sense.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense. I'm saying it sidesteps the valid point that it was responding to.

And sometimes you actually have to deal with terrain as such, not any map.

Sometimes the map is the terrain (or to be more precise but less pithy, sometimes maps are encoded in the terrain and are therefore part of the terrain).

The brain evolved precisely because operating at a higher level of abstraction is valuable. If you understand the brain in terms only of neural firings and not in terms of the concepts they encode, you will never properly understand what the brain is doing.

If the subject under discussion is something symbolic, or symbol using (e.g. a map) then trying to understand it in terms of its physical instantiation (atoms of paper and ink) is likely going to lead you astray.

Put another way, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

The terrain isn't even the terrain! That's still just a map of lower level terrain.

Your Holmes quote strikes a chord with a concept that I've had internally for a while: "bottom-up" vs "top-down" learning.

I'm more of a "bottom-up" learner myself — I like to immerse myself in the details and then over time build an idea of how things work from that.

But it's common to teach subjects in a more top-down way, especially in academic settings. You're told the big conclusions first, then maybe if you have time, get into the details of why. Perhaps in the homework assignments.

There are pros and cons to each, but I do have a soft spot for the hard-won high-level conclusions that are distilled from complexity rather than being taken for granted. It gives a more satisfying and thorough understanding of things, though at the expense of much time and effort.

I feel like Holmes' "this side" or "that side" of complexity refers to going through that effort.

This seems to be an article written for neurotypical people and I envy them somewhat in this respect.

I live my life in the detail and while it has benefits for my career, it has been a source of exhaustion and frustration when communicating with people who don't live in the details i.e. the majority.

It seems much easier to live at the high level and choose to drill down into the details than to live in the details and remind yourself to step back, but I could be wrong.

For example: I edited this brief comment 8 times.

As a non-neurotypical person myself, I sympathize with your feelings on the article, and felt them myself when reading it. But I also found it to be quite empowering. The truth is, whatever your field of work or interest is, the detail _is_ beautiful, and not everyone gets to experience it.

Don't get me wrong, there's a spectrum (no pun intended) and feeling constantly lost in a sea of details can be really disabling, especially in a social order that demands quick judgements, conformity, and adaptibility to constant change. (No "but" at the end of this paragraph, it just sucks.)

I feel like we live in a world w/ to many "high level people". At least in the world of software development. We need more people in the weeds. 20 Different high level ideas from high level stakeholders benefits no one. It's also way easier and maybe even more fun to be a "high level" abstract thinking. The devil and quite frankly the work is in the nuts and bolts but others want to to dismiss that as "sausage making".

Sometimes being constantly absorbed in the details makes you miss the forest for the trees. High-level people have to think in broad stokes cause the details can be overwhelming. It's important to interface with the opposite type of person from time to time to get the whole picture.

That's surprising to me. I can't imagine what it would even mean to live your life at the lower abstraction levels, since those are things like molecules, cells, and muscle fibres.

I'm tempted to interpret your reply as saying you operate on a more detailed level than the average person, rather than the most detailed, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.

This article strongly reminded me of "Reality has surprising amount of detail", an old HN favorite:

http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

E: which was also noted by the top comment under the article

>Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there’s been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views: the world is like this, those people are like that, X is good, Y is bad, A causes B. Not complicated, bro.

>The world exists in infinite resolution, and that’s what we’re built for.

Except of course that's not how people or nature work. Call it an algorithm or heuristic or whatever you want, but e.g. "don't eat brightly colored animals" is wildly successful. The world does exist in "infinite resolution" but we are not built for it. That's the basic premise of The Good Place: life's too complicated for a person to look at the infinite resolution of everything; just doing the best one can and trying to do better is really all we can do. Don't over-generalize about people, but these shorthands are how we get through an infinitely complicated day.

Also, as a kid playing some version of what we called murder[1], a good rule of thumb was the murderer was the one who gave too much detail.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wink_murder

And that my friends, is why Virtual Reality will never ever be real, or even look real. I know it's truism, but the sheer realization of that makes me empty and desperate (jk).

Just trying to simulate realism would mean you take an object in your hand in VR, and are able to examine it closely, seeing scratches or others details.

Of course, these details must not be made using procedural generation. That would mean going back to square 1, a superficial world of shallow details. We want details that have a history.

So imagine you're able to find a way to scan these details and reproduce them in VR. You'd have the same problem at a deeper level, say using a magnifier, only revealing the void of your digital life and nothing around has meaning.

Say now you're able to scan details at deeper levels, even at an infinitely deep level. You'd have to store them, and that would probably mean using more storage that they are atoms in this world, so it would be impossible, or would it? Would it be possible to compress details, or vectorize them, so that they'd take less weight that their equivalent?

Another problem would be details for objects that exist only in VR. Here again, these details would need to have a history. That scratch would be here or there and in that shape for a specific reason. That would require a deep understanding of physical laws, and being able to reproduce them at infinitely smaller levels. And store them here again.

So I guess that makes the whole task impossible. I guess it'll never be possible to transfer your soul into VR, and even if it were, you'd become crazy realizing your world is limited, not by the geographical limits you're bound to, but by the depth of details you'd be able to explore.

Just don't put magnifiers in your VR game. Problem solved.

> We want details that have a history.

For the VR to be real, sure. But for the VR to look good? I don't think so. People don't care about history when they care about looks. Case in point: pre-damaged jeans. Procedural generation is also not failing when it's lacking details, but when the large scale stuff looks off. Take a basic example of grass patterns in games: if they are made non-repeating, then at the level of detail the game is about, they have all the realism you could ask for.

Speaking of grass distribution.

https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0009

There is a lot of detail that goes into it sometimes.

I don't think virtual reality should feel real. It's the same as animation or painting - if you can make it look real, of course it takes skill and looks impressive, but these things let you create absolutely unreal things. Space monsters, landscapes like Van Gogh did, talking fish, whatever one can imagine.

Of course it will not have details, but when you know something isn't real, the details will not matter as much.

There's a similar point to be made about simulation. When philosophers suggest we might live in a a simulation I always wonder where the simulation would be running such that all this detail could be coherently generated.

The simulation only has to simulate one mind with enough details to keep the one mind occupied.

It can be lonely at the top, so maybe go for two.

You could probably snapshot the universe in a hologram-esque structure when it's in a state of high entropy/low kinetic energy

Who said that it had to be ? Paintings / Photographs / Movies / Video Games aren't real either, and still we appreciate them nonetheless.

Some of the issues that you raise up can still probably dealt with.

It's a shame that TFA stops at the molecular level, because lower than that things are different. To start with, details aren't infinite. You literally cannot tell elementary particles apart, because they do NOT have detail, and this has wide-ranging implications. One of the laws of physics that is deemed to be the most inviolable is the law of paraconservation of information : our ability to transform energy into useful work depends on the information we have about the system in question ! Related to this, the number of involved particles is typically so huge that you can assume fluctuations to be negligible.

So for instance what one could do, is to only simulate the reality deep enough depending on the momentary attention the user is paying to a specific part of it, and rely on statistics otherwise. And only store the history of those parts, and only for as long as they are expected to persist.

You could also provide intricate and this time literally infinite amount of detail using fractals - if exact reproduction isn't the goal.

«Transferring your soul» is a way harder question, since you would have to first figure out what you even mean by «soul».

Once upon a time, I was furious with my 4th grade science teachers for teaching me LIES... the Niels Bohr Model of the Atom, bringing coathangers and styrofoam balls to school on the bus when TRULY the atom was an electron cloud of probabilities, etc. etc.

All that time wasted, all those coathangers and styrofoam ball USELESS because that wasn't what was really going on.

Cue several years later and I'm trying to model my kitchen in sketchup to figure out if something is going to fit, or if some remodeling project is worthwhile or even feasible.

I start measuring and modeling the countertops, and question: do I need to account for the countertop overhang, or can I just treat them as cubes? I needed the overhang.

Do I need to account for the "toe-kick" (cutout where your feet go instead of banging the cabinets)? Maybe?

What about the cabinet doors? Further: what about the inlays? The handles? What about the insides? The supporting structures, the screws and studs?

I then thought back to the humble "Niels Bohr Model of the Atom" and forgave my teachers, because I had just then realized: "A model must be just good enough to be useful, and sometimes too much detail isn't helpful (or useful)"

It's an extremely useful perspective to have: First decide the utility (the questions you'd like to answer) and then choose the most effective ROI to get there. Further: having varying levels of "zoom" or detail with different acquisition, maintenance, or usage costs isn't out of the question!

Walls and floor/ceiling not being parallel (old house) tripped me up when I modeled my perfect kitchen in abstract 3D software land and then tried to make it happen in real life.

It might be possible with generative AI at some point...

In due time, I believe in-situ AI rendering will allow us to generate new zoom layers upon further inspection of an object. Do I think a generation of kids growing up with AI-enhanced VR to be dystopian in a way? Yeah.

All true, but quite banal? All those blog posts that sell themselves as profound philosophical insights while pushing truisms like pearls on a string are, well, disappointing. This is hollow.

Things which are obviously true to someone who has encountered them many times before (or so long ago that they have forgotten how it felt not to know them) are shining pearls of wisdom to the person who has never come across them before.

Maybe, but... where do we start?

Also, interestingly, TFA clearly states that children start out seeking details, and it's only adults who fail to see the trees for the forest, so to speak.

If this is correct, everyone has "encountered this many times before"...

As famously noted by Horton, though I prefer Blake:

    Auguries of Innocence
    BY WILLIAM BLAKE

    To see a World in a Grain of Sand
    And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
    And Eternity in an hour
    A Robin Red breast in a Cage
    Puts all Heaven in a Rage 
    A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
    Shudders Hell thr' all its regions 
    A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
    Predicts the ruin of the State 
    A Horse misusd upon the Road
    Calls to Heaven for Human blood 
    Each outcry of the hunted Hare
    A fibre from the Brain does tear 
    A Skylark wounded in the wing 
    A Cherubim does cease to sing 
    The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight
    Does the Rising Sun affright 
    Every Wolfs & Lions howl
    Raises from Hell a Human Soul 
    The wild deer, wandring here & there 
    Keeps the Human Soul from Care 
    The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife
    And yet forgives the Butchers knife 
    The Bat that flits at close of Eve
    Has left the Brain that wont Believe
    The Owl that calls upon the Night
    Speaks the Unbelievers fright
    He who shall hurt the little Wren
    Shall never be belovd by Men 
    He who the Ox to wrath has movd
    Shall never be by Woman lovd
    The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
    Shall feel the Spiders enmity 
    He who torments the Chafers Sprite
    Weaves a Bower in endless Night 
    The Catterpiller on the Leaf
    Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief 
    Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly 
    For the Last Judgment draweth nigh 
    He who shall train the Horse to War
    Shall never pass the Polar Bar 
    The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat 
    Feed them & thou wilt grow fat 
    The Gnat that sings his Summers Song
    Poison gets from Slanders tongue 
    The poison of the Snake & Newt
    Is the sweat of Envys Foot 
    The poison of the Honey Bee
    Is the Artists Jealousy
    The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags
    Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags 
    A Truth thats told with bad intent
    Beats all the Lies you can invent 
    It is right it should be so 
    Man was made for Joy & Woe 
    And when this we rightly know 
    Thro the World we safely go 
    Joy & Woe are woven fine 
    A Clothing for the soul divine 
    Under every grief & pine
    Runs a joy with silken twine 
    The Babe is more than swadling Bands
    Throughout all these Human Lands
    Tools were made & Born were hands 
    Every Farmer Understands
    Every Tear from Every Eye
    Becomes a Babe in Eternity 
    This is caught by Females bright
    And returnd to its own delight 
    The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar 
    Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore 
    The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath
    Writes Revenge in realms of Death 
    The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air
    Does to Rags the Heavens tear 
    The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun 
    Palsied strikes the Summers Sun
    The poor Mans Farthing is worth more
    Than all the Gold on Africs Shore
    One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands
    Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands 
    Or if protected from on high 
    Does that whole Nation sell & buy 
    He who mocks the Infants Faith
    Shall be mockd in Age & Death 
    He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
    The rotting Grave shall neer get out 
    He who respects the Infants faith
    Triumphs over Hell & Death 
    The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons
    Are the Fruits of the Two seasons 
    The Questioner who sits so sly 
    Shall never know how to Reply 
    He who replies to words of Doubt
    Doth put the Light of Knowledge out 
    The Strongest Poison ever known
    Came from Caesars Laurel Crown 
    Nought can Deform the Human Race
    Like to the Armours iron brace 
    When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow
    To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow 
    A Riddle or the Crickets Cry
    Is to Doubt a fit Reply 
    The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile
    Make Lame Philosophy to smile 
    He who Doubts from what he sees
    Will neer Believe do what you Please 
    If the Sun & Moon should Doubt 
    Theyd immediately Go out 
    To be in a Passion you Good may Do 
    But no Good if a Passion is in you 
    The Whore & Gambler by the State
    Licencd build that Nations Fate 
    The Harlots cry from Street to Street 
    Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet 
    The Winners Shout the Losers Curse 
    Dance before dead Englands Hearse 
    Every Night & every Morn
    Some to Misery are Born 
    Every Morn and every Night
    Some are Born to sweet delight 
    Some are Born to sweet delight 
    Some are Born to Endless Night 
    We are led to Believe a Lie
    When we see not Thro the Eye
    Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night 
    When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light 
    God Appears & God is Light
    To those poor Souls who dwell in Night 
    But does a Human Form Display
    To those who Dwell in Realms of day

tl;dr?

It's all perspective: layers, details, abstraction. Sometimes it's not visual but perceptive instead, like the passing of time.

It's a poem, so you kinda have to make your own interpretation but it's a famous one so lots of people have, I assume, bloviated on the topic online already.

This article made me think of the poem due to lines up front:

    To see a World in a Grain of Sand
    And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
    And Eternity in an hour

and

    A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
    Predicts the ruin of the State

You can see a whole world in a grain of sand: the closer you look the more there is to see an understand. People spend their whole lives looking at tiny complex worlds (in, say, biology or cosmology). The flowers are full not only of chemistry but cooperation and, best of all, mathematics.

And as for the dog...sometimes the significant signals aren't where you might think to look.

The whole poem is a disquisition on the topic of scale discussed in a more shallow way by the article.

Truth is not defined. First author equates truth with details of reality, which is doubtful already. Then jumps to examples like

> Is drug prohibition justifiable? Was Napoleon an admirable figure?

Question of opinion can't be answered with truth. Or if you want any answer to it is truth, because it is truly your opinion.

It's a lazy take with a poorly chosen analogy at the root.

Both of those questions are fundamentally questions of morality. This means that there is, or at least can be, an objective answer to the question provided sufficient parameters are specified, not least of which is the system of morality being used.

The distinction matters. I may not enjoy a book purely as a matter of taste. I think most of us have had the experience of reading or watching something that we would have agreed was well-crafted while also not remotely enjoying the experience. There is a good deal of pure subjectivity here. I cannot be argued into enjoying something. However it is possible to either change one's system of values or else to be shown that one's evaluation of a subject in the light of those values is missing something.

The examples in the article are of things we could look at more closely, if only we cared to look.

Often, it's not so easy. All we have to go on are sketchy news reports. You won't get the details from reading a news article online.

Indeed. It's good to keep that in mind when we're encouraged to draw firm conclusions - or, worse, provoked into strong emotions - based on broad abstractions. Of course, we often do need to form opinions, but it follows that we should appropriately discount our conclusions, and appropriately weight those of people who have more-detailed experience.

>The world exists in infinite resolution, and that’s what we’re built for. The truth is made of details, and they go all the way down. Any ideas about it just rest on the top.

This isn't known. The greatest depth of resolution we know about is the elementary particles. Quarks, Leptons and Bosons.

The smallest meaningful length is the 1.6×10^−35 and it's known as the planck length. We don't know what's smaller than that length.

This length places a hard limit on our very notion of abstraction. You think your memories and imagination are ethereal abstractions that have no meaningful size or resolution? False. Your memory and even thought takes up physical space in your head and whatever that physical space is it can be no smaller than the planck length. This limit puts a full stop on even the most ethereal abstraction you can think of. Everything and I mean everything... even that feeling you get when you remember the sound or smell from some place in your childhood, that feeling itself takes up physical space and has a limited resolution.

I get what he's talking about and I know I'm being pedantic. But the fact that he just stated something that's axiomatically wrong shows that his ideas here are not likely to be fully correct and he's not thinking deep enough.

Our existence is owed to the macro viewpoint. I am not simply a collection of atoms and particles. The arrangement of those particles is what makes me human. The macro view with less details is what gives me, and you meaning. From a quantitative perspective this viewpoint is measurable as entropy.

The truth is often hidden by the details it is not hidden in the details.

“If you could look even closer (and you can with a microscope) the detail would continue to unfold essentially forever, or at least until you reach the molecular scale”

This is also wrong. We have ways to deduce resolution smaller than the molecular scale.

Your Planck-length-attention to detail seems to have failed to parse the "at least" part of the sentence, which by formal logic makes it correct again, doesn't it?

By the way you're saying yourself that this scale has to be deduced and isn't observable anymore. I suppose it could be argued that the essay is rather about what we as human individuals could observe by more or less direct means, and about what normal people could comprehend if they wanted to. It's not a stretch to say that musings about the quantum realm are beyond the scope of most.

You're not wrong, of course the author could have chosen to extend his argument deeper into the fine structure of matter itself. But he didn't, and I think he gets the point across just as well, so the discussion seems a bit silly.

The author didn't need to extend his argument that far. That wasn't my point.

What he did is make some statements that are factually wrong. Reality as we know it does not have infinite resolution. This is categorically false.

It points to the fact about how his arguments aren't fundamentally true. His point is flawed because at the low level it's false.

In my argument I took it further. I made the counter point. You probably didn't read far enough.

If you did you would agree with my counter point. At a high level, both of our overall points have truth. But this guy is talking about his point as if it's the one fundamental truth, and he even uses the term infinite resolution which again is false.

If you were so "pedantic", you would have known Planck length isn't "the resolution of physical universe".

At the risk of ad hominem, it sounds like you're just very eager to show off the fact (or misconception) you know about this term.

The Planck length is the smallest meaningful length, as far as we know.

There's no risk here... your statement is a deliberate personal attack, there's no other way to put it. It's like stabbing someone, but stating that you're doing so at the risk of looking like your committing murder.

> The Planck length is the smallest meaningful length, as far as we know.

No, this is not correct. The smallest meaningful length we actually know about based on experimental data is about twenty orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length, i.e., about the size of an atomic nucleus. As I pointed out in response to your first post, your statement about the Planck length is a plausible speculation in quantum gravity, not a known fact.

How was this experimental data obtained?

Particle physics experiments over decades. One of the primary goals of such experiments has been to probe smaller and smaller distance scales.

The author said "meaningful" resolution. If you're so eager to correct others' pedantry, you might be more charitable before offering such a hasty rebuttal.

Yeah, especially since elementary particles don't have detail almost by definition.

And it's a missed opportunity for the article to also point out that there might be a temptation of trying to go way too deep than it's worthwhile for that specific situation - meanwhile if the levels of detail were literally infinite, you wouldn't try. But I guess it would muddle the message ?

> The smallest meaningful length is the 1.6×10^−35 and it's known as the planck length.

This is not a known fact. It's a plausible speculation in quantum gravity, but we are not going to be able to test it any time soon.

I agree that we don't know that "infinite resolution" is correct; but we also don't know that it's wrong.

Nice read, interesting discussion. I'd add that switching one's perspective from one viewing angle to another, regardless of the resolution, often provides invaluable information. A classic example is looking at two different shadows - one is a square, the other is a circle. The same object (a cylinder) can cast these two shadows.

In the realm of ideas, such as the examples given on drug prohibition and Napoleon, this translates into generating arguments for and against the idea. Indeed, when querying LLMs on subjects, one of the more useful techniques is to ask for the pro/con arguments, essentially getting the LLM to argue with itself.

There's something related to this that I want to explore: Limits of rationality and human experience.

Rationalists break things down with logical tools to a point where they can get an answer - they zoom in to specific problems. This is good and useful. The problem comes when we zoom back out again, and try to generify the specific solution. The specific solution works in a certain context, but we haven't proven that it works in other contexts.

Then someone makes an authoritative statement about psychology or sociology or politics that makes sense in their context, but it ignores the human experience and history.

Everybody is made of their own details.

Apropos the first examples given in TFA, I have a friend who worked at Oxford Scientific Films, back in the '70s and' 80s. When Jim Henson wanted to make a Serious Movie, with puppets, he hired OSF (or artists from - I don't know the exact business arrangement) to build the sets. They had experience with natural materials, which Henson wanted precisely because of their fractal detail. My friend has a credit somewhere towards the end of the reel on Dark Crystal, which I thought was cooler than he did when he told me.

I really liked this.

It reminds me of Michael Pollan's book A Place of My Own The Architecture of Daydreams - https://michaelpollan.com/books/a-place-of-my-own/

Michael goes into great detail on building his own office space. It was really cool to read all the details.

It also reminds me of a Tom Silva quote, "The money is in the details."

The image captions are a fun touch.

«[The leaf] has rounded serrations along its edges» - uses a picture of a leaf not showing the edge :(

The premise reminds me of this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385

Talking about "the truth" is tricky because everyone sees things differently, words can't always capture reality perfectly, and what we think is true can change over time. Plus, the idea of truth itself is really complicated.

The article premise is false, and content is 56% well structured LLM nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

Some people do have trouble distinguishing sycophantic idealism... from evidenced observation.

The "Baloney Detection Kit" may help, or just make yourself angrier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ

Ok look, a sale on jellybeans... the day is getting even better. =)

False how? It's just one person's observations and opinions.

Evidenced observation differs in that the phenomena holds constant for everyone, and the reasoning behind that model constantly improves.

The poem alludes to the concurrent perspectives that may all be considered "Truth". Yet skillfully pokes fun at our tendency to seek simple explanations about incomprehensible subjects. i.e. the idea of perfectionism itself is a false concept, and often can never be 100% certain of anything.

Even in the field of Mathematics there are provably unsolvable problems, and that will unlikely ever change.

In summary:

1. It is easier to prove something logically false

2. It is difficult to prove an ephemeral truth will hold

3. A false sense of accomplishment drives people to behave in aberrant irrational manners

Have a wonderful day, and remember to tip your robot on the way out =)

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