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Comment by gabbagool | Hacker News Reader

Or, ask yourself the following question:

If you read every single book there is about The Grand Canyon, and watched every single video and/or documentary about The Grand Canyon, do you believe that you have fully experienced The Grand Canyon? Or do you just have to be there to fully experience it.

I dunno. Substitute in whatever you want for "The Grand Canyon". Maybe climbing Mount Everest or walking on the Moon. The point is that maybe the human experience is more vast than what is written about it.

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You have to be there to have a subjective experience of the Grand Canyon, for whatever that's worth. (This is essentially the qualia distinction between us and LLMs, writ large.)

But in terms of objective knowledge about the Grand Canyon, reading every article and scholarly work would give you a much better grounding. Unless you're a geologist/ecologist doing actual field research there, actually seeing the Grand Canyon would add little, if anything, to your factual knowledge and understanding of the site.

Beyond scientific knowledge, being there would (much more quickly) yield quite a lot of (higher quality) knowledge about "how to navigate and do things in the Grand Canyon."

If I'm going to hire a guide, I'm going to hire the guy who spent a week hiking it instead of the guy who spent a week reading about it or watching videos about it.

In this context that isn't the right question.

Rather one should ask "Would you be able to answer any question and fulfill any request about the Grand Canyon given to you by others in a way that will be indistinguishable from someone who has been to the Grand Canyon"

What is the current ratio of opened to unopened cans of soda in the canyon, and how has that ratio developed over the last thirty days?

I'd be fantastically surprised if you could provide a precise answer to any such question without extensive security footage that doesn't exist.

An estimate, perhaps, but you probably couldn't even answer a simpler "how many people are currently in the canyon" without resorting to estimation given the lack of information currently available via the mentioned sources.

I suspect the same limitations apply to Grand Canyon visitors

This is setting up a contrast between long term memory and an LLM.

You might equally contrast someone who is physically in the Grand Canyon with an LLM given access to a drone with sensory attachments. I'd bet that if you told groups of humans and drone-controlling AIs to find something interesting, the humans would be more variable and cover a wider range of interesting discoveries but often just give up on the task, while the AI would be more likely to find something but would cluster around certain discoveries and make fewer overall.

I think I could get very close via video. But that depends on a lot of my non-canyon experience moving around the world, and LLMs are very flawed in their ability to input video, so I think they would not get nearly as close.

I've been to a few natural wonders (including the Grand Canyon) that I saw in advance on video. At least for me it isn't close at all. Even if audiovisual elements could be near-perfectly reproduced by video (imo not even close with modern tech, no screen is capturing the brilliance of sunlight), you aren't capturing the temperature, the feel of wind or rain, the smell of the plants around you, etc.

But you already know those feelings from being outside elsewhere. You get a unique combination there, but that's only worth so much.

> only worth so much.

Worth... quite a lot imo.

First, in the slightly objective sense of "What is this place like in real life, under X conditions." But, more subjectively, watching a video of a glacier and imagining the wind/rain/cold doesn't even approach 5% of the intensity and awe of climbing up a mountain yourself to see a seemingly endless expanse of ice, struggling to stand steady because of the wind, shivering because of the cold and rain. And finally, in the financial sense, a lot of people routinely spend many thousands of dollars and days-weeks of their time to experience natural wonders in real life.

There's so much natural wonder in the world in and around your home.

It's not that the value of the grand canyon is low in an absolute sense, it's that in a relative sense the gap between "empty numb void" and "hiking at home (plus grand canyon videos)" is far far greater than the gap between "hiking at home (plus grand canyon videos)" and "actual grand canyon".

> in a relative sense the gap between "empty numb void" and "hiking at home (plus grand canyon videos)" is far far greater than the gap between "hiking at home (plus grand canyon videos)" and "actual grand canyon".

Have you ever been to a place which is really high up? You're above the trees and can not only see as far as the curvature of the earth allows you to, but are high enough that the curvature of the earth allows you to see for miles. The air is thinner so it's easier to take a breath yet harder to catch it. Your sweat evaporates faster but a breeze doesn't cool you as much. The sun is brighter, rises earlier and sets later. The wildlife makes unfamiliar sounds and sound itself is changed. Even the same food tastes different.

It's not something you can get by sitting at home and changing the background on your computer.

I haven't been that high but I've been in places with some pretty impressive views. And the grand canyon doesn't give you that mountaintop experience either.

Back to the topic, I'm sure it's very impressive, but I think you're underestimating just how impressive our baseline is.

> There's so much natural wonder in the world in and around your home.

Sure, no doubt. But I don't really think "video of my local state park + imagining the parts that aren't conveyed over video" is particularly close to the real thing either.

Well, I've never been to the Grand Canyon myself, but what you said perfectly aligns with my intuition.

Also, you touched on how even modern tech still falls short of the true experience. Just look at the history of motion picture since the early 1900s. We have added sound, color, bigger screens, faster refresh rates, more pixels, 3D (sort of), surround sound, spatial audio, IMAX, etc. Almost seems like video leaves a lot to be desired.

4d gaussian splats are going to be a major revolution in vicarious experiences

I don't know. I think some "wonders" like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls are more impressive in aerial videos and are kind of a let down in person -- you can't really see the whole thing when you are next to it.

Mt Rushmore is better and more impressive in media than IRL. Saw North by Northwest a few times and went later in my life just didn’t compare.

The experience of every famous place I've visited after watching extensive video before hand, has been very different from what I imagined from the video.

Grand Canyon looks kinda meh on pictures/video. It's much more impressive in person. Honestly, it's amazing taking a picture of something that's breathtaking and the picture not being breathtaking.

No way. You get to the rim and only then you realize how huge it is. And then you still have to go down into the canyon.

The experience of vastness is mostly due to (high-res) stereoscopic vision. When you experience 6DOF VR in a fairly high-res world it definitely comes much, much closer to the awe one feels with the real experience.

It's similar in dismissing artificial audio based on listening to some pop song on a basic mobile speaker versus listening to well-designed binaural audio on good headphones. The latter can sound 'freakily' 'real'.

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