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Comment by j_maffe | Hacker News Reader

> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.

This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.

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This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.

Do you know how to make paper? Can you? Is it any good? Do you really understand it then?

You’re stretching the meaning of understanding to ridiculous levels of uselessness. If you’re slapped across the face, do you need to understand physics and biology to know how the movement and speed of a hand interacting with the tissue of your face and interpreted by your brain and nervous system makes it hurt?

Understanding why pain happens is what allowed for anesthesia and modern medicine, which massively improved the quality of life of our species. Did we need to figure out how to do that? Sure, in the same way we needed to figure out how to create fire, or craft tools.

>do you need to understand physics and biology to know how the movement and speed of a hand interacting wi

In one sense, no because we get this programmed in for free by our ancient biology. But do note that it did not just pop up full formed and took quntillions of complex interactions over eons of time to get to the point it is now. This is why making robots that behave like biological entities is insanely hard, evolution has spent an epic fuckton of compute on the problem already.

Now, if you're building human like robots, then yes, you need to understand all the above.

We're downthread of someone moaning about the complexity of a world which requires him to understand sidewalks, strangers and rooms he isn't allowed to enter. Doesn't feel like paper is any more intuitive or 'natural' at any level than those, and tbh if I don't have to understand it well enough to understand how it's made, glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either...

> glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either

Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.

Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.

Well yeah, designing them is hard, even making the glass is hard. Similarly, ancient civilization was full of buildings whose constructors did very complex things but didn't understand the second order effects and artisans that spent a lifetime honing their skills to work on it. But anyone that can dismiss them as uncomplicated because they're just stone shouldn't need to worry too much about the engineers and digital models and processes behind the glass ones either.

But did the writer understand how the language got created and how the words shape her thoughts?

Plenty of people master more than one domain. It's actually easier when the knowledge is more accessibly distributed in more generalised form, so you don't have to find out how to build stone vaults that don't collapse by trial and error

Ancient civilizations were full of laws people didn't control and property they didn't own, enforced by weapons they had no idea how to make imported from regions they knew nothing of and would have no opportunity to ever visit. And you didn't really understand the priest's explanation for why the gods had determined your infant sons deserved to die any better than the average person nowadays understands the antibiotics that could have enabled them not to die...

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

great post,

> Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent.

That quote really stuck out to me. Personally I help myself with this frequently by attempting to write down steps to recreate guides or other basic material - rubber ducking to a beginner essentially.

Do you know what went into Roman Concrete?

Being a polymath was once doable.

Any reasonably intelligent child who can write some poetry, understand basic calculus, and has a working knowledge of chemistry would be heralded as a polymath if you dropped them into the Victorian era. The breadth of human knowledge is just bigger now.

You’re stretching it way too far. Most adults don’t have all those, let alone “reasonably intelligent” children. There were child geniuses before, too.

To be fair, there's an awful lot a not particularly intelligent high school child is taught about biology that Aristotle, who clearly was a genius, didn't when trying to synthesize the existing knowledge of everyone he met and come up with new ideas from his own observations.

It's unlikely Aristotle made the mistake of thinking that because other people generally weren't writing this stuff down that meant the world was an uncomplicated place

And yet the stylus was useless to the overwhelming majority of humans who ever lived because they were illiterate. And the stone houses required specialized knowledge held by the masons. And you can walk into any major research university and bump into scores of curious and driven people each holding more knowledge than Pliny the elder.

People seem to have this conception that the average premodern person could do anything from growing crops to coming up with Newtonian theories. No. The average premodern person died before the age the average modern person learned algebra.

A stylus is crafted, paper in manufacturered. I suppose you can rip off some bark and scribble onto it, but what are you writing? Words. Do you know every word ever? Do you have comprehension of the meaning of every word? Building a structure of stone requires knowledge, otherwise it'll fall down and the knowledge that allows for that was accumulated over thousands of years. There were people who mastered pottery and nothing else, people who could do a little bit of everything but were master of none.

We only ever think we understand, we never truly do. There's infinite complexity to the universe we live in and there always has been, the illusion of simplicity is a false construct we create to feel more comfortable about our existence.

You liver doesn't know your name. Neither there is any evidence of you having a liver in your consciousness.

You don't even need society for that. Remember the bear scene from the revenant?

I hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.

Perhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.

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