23 ms·

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

• serpix 9y ago
  This here is why estimation of tasks (in software) is IMHO futile hand waving. There is always unknown unknowns, snags and hangups which may surprise everyone. Everybody who actually creates or makes something can agree that that stuff is hard, really hard but oh so rewarding!
  • TremendousJudge 9y ago
    the point of good estimation is not the estimation itself (which is not very reliable), but actually thinking about what the details of the task are. I think the estimation should be seen as an excuse to partake in this exercise
• Jedi72 9y ago
  TL:DR; Hofstadter's law.
  • nielsbot 9y ago
    I think you might be leaving out some detail
  • KineticLensman 9y ago
    Hofstadter's law [0]: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Interesting, Hofstadter's original motivation for the law was the observation (published in 1979) about the then delays in computers beating grandmasters at chess (first in 1997 and now routinely_. This gives us a data point about 'just how long' things can take (in addition to the numerous examples from software projects). Nuclear fusion is still out there... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
• tw1010 9y ago
  People are surprisingly unimaginative about the richness of reality.
• franciscop 9y ago
  This resonates so well with Engineering in an unexpected way for me: the "production" version is orders of magnitude harder than the prototype. I kist expected it to be plainly harder. I'm not talking just about programming. At my University I used to make robot arms and RC stuff with my classmates. Polystyrene, Arduino and a lot of duck tape were our friends, winning even a NASA competition. It was actually quite fun and fairly easy. After finishing and while I was freelancing, I tried to take it to the next level. Once you get to rigid pieces and tight couplings, there is a huge amount of details and gears that I don't even know how to start searching for. What I learned at my University (Industrial Engineering) won't work as well, since I am not ready to order 10000s of pieces.
• fb03 9y ago
  I'd say "fiddliness" is a characteristic of happiness and focused work. If you overlook most details you are basically just 'doing stuff to get objectives done', which is meager imho. Getting acquainted with detail takes us away from the vast sameness that we experience when we are just running on automatic and helps us cherish and savor each moment as complexity unfurls.
  • mratzloff 9y ago
    I think you really hit on something here. Anytime I'm working on a hobby of mine, I like to actively get into the weeds (figuratively, occasionally literally). It's in exploring and learning about the depth of the unknown that I find the most enjoyment. I learned to love talking to strangers when I realized the richness and variety of human experience is so vast that no one person can feel or experience everything another person can in their lifetime. In retrospect, it's amazing I had to realize this at all, but we all start out self-absorbed.
    • fb03 9y ago
      It's probably when you're into those small universes, chasing down detail, that you are most happy and comfortable, even tho you might not be at that specific time your most productive self. After all, when 'flow' happens, We are not really caring about the passage of time, right? ;)
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Depends on the point of your focus. Fiddliness stops being funny when you have a deadline. Or when you're doing what you love, but have only so much time between work, errands and social obligations - and then a bullshit issue comes up and stops you in your tracks.
• CurtMonash 9y ago
  There's something of a connection here to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two examples come to mind: 1. The narrator thinks it's important to have in your toolset hammers of multiple hardness, because your hammer should be softer than whatever material you're hammering on at the time. At least, that's how I remember it; I might well be wrong about -- well, about the DETAILS of that example. Please correct me if I am. 2. A student gets and assignment to write an essay about a particular brick wall. He can't see how to fill the assigned length with anything interesting. The instructor then says OK, write instead only about the left-topmost brick. The student has so much to say about it he has trouble making his essay SHORT enough to meet the assignment's requirements.
  • Wildgoose 9y ago
    From memory, the student in (2) was female. That has been one of the parts that really struck home with me as well - Change Your Perspective and then Look Again.
    • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Can you expand on that - I'm failing to see how the sex of the student is relevant?
      • jstanley 9y ago
        2 separate points. The student was female (OP said "he"), and also that passage was notable (but not because she was female).
        • Wildgoose 9y ago
          Yes, although I should probably haven't brought the correction up in the first place as it wasn't relevant to the main point.
          • brianpan 9y ago
• tpaschalis 9y ago
  Awesome post! Personally, I've experienced this in academia, with me being the culprit but also in a team setting. Fresh graduates, seem to be convinced that their narrow-scope textbook knowledge can conquer the world! I've studied Electromagnetism, one would exclaim! How hard can the software implementation be? Why should I bother with technicalities such noise introduced by the cable setup? The moment you take a step back, realize that a real-world project has so many details, that your team can get collectively stuck, and that you might be just flat out wrong is really humbling.
• DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need. Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things. I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an inverse correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.
  • mjburgess 9y ago
    Well. People still don't know, but now they have enough information to seem as-if they do. Understanding is not a matter of a google. It's a decade of relevant experience. You might beat the PhD to the factoid phrase, but when you come to employ the fact in the relevant problem you won't even know where to begin or even what it really meant. People aren't exercising their ability to distinguish parroting from understanding, as-if intellectual work is just different forms of trivial pursuit.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • sorokod 9y ago
      In the same spirit there is the cheapening of the concept of "research". Often the statement "I did some research" means that some googling has occurred.
      • alextheparrot 9y ago
• amelius 9y ago
  So intuitively we have a tendency to make models of everything around us. And now we are encouraged to smash those abstractions to pieces, so we can find better ones. Does that sum it up?
  • tonyarkles 9y ago
    From a software perspective at least, my rule has always been "know that what you're looking at is an abstraction, and know that there's details underneath". Most of the time you can get by using the abstraction (e.g. walking up and down the stairs), but once in a while you're going to have to peel the abstraction back and look a bit deeper to understand what's going on (e.g. replacing a cracked stringer). I personally took this to an extreme... I learned to program at quite a young age, and dual-majored in EE and CS specifically so that I could understand the systems that ran my software. I'm happy writing Python, but if I need to dig into the CPython run-time to figure out a bug I'm ok with that. And if I need to run tcpdump to figure out why a TCP stream is stalling, I'm good with that. The abstractions are beautiful and work 99.9% of the time, but if you don't know how the abstractions are built, you're going to have a hard time figuring out what's wrong when they break down.
• rtpg 9y ago
  Super interesting! I feel like most programmers have it easy. For the most part the first step of a program is "take the universe and project it to some fixed structure". The entire universe of complexity gone. The box has to be the right shape, but even if it's not things can mostly work. You forget to account for wind and suddenly your New York skyscraper is falling over. Forget a field in your database and you just have a slightly busted thing.
  • mgoetzke 9y ago
    In light of some memorable software design failures (which includes not just code but UX design, usage scenarios, compliance etc) I would kindly disagree. And the people of Hawaii would too I am sure. It really depends what the software is used for. Software is just peoples thoughts and intentions codified for quick access/evaluation. If they are used for a game it might not be important, if they are used for something important it also becomes important and exactly because the complexity of real life is difficult to account for ahead of time.
    • rtpg 9y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to minimize the consequences. There are massive failures, and now, more than ever, software interacts with other software in unpredictable ways. I was just expressing the feeling that things are even worse in other domains. Though sometimes automating a huge unstructured mess is difficult, imagine having a huge unstructured mess and dealing with it by hand! Programmers might have many problems, but at least a subset of the work happens in a purely mathematical space.
• tempestn 9y ago
  Having never done any carpentry nor googled the answer, the first thing that's coming to mind is to place the board at the angle you want, then use a straight edge (like a level) extended out from the floor of the upper story to trace a line on the board. Cut the board, then flip it over so that cut side is on the bottom, and then repeat the process to cut the top. Edit: I guess my first line will read as a disclaimer if I'm wrong (aka missing an important detail!) or a brag if I'm right; it's intended as the former!
  • cricalix 9y ago
    I think you've got a slight problem with this approach, that a diagram should illustrate if you draw the board as a rectangle and not a line. Thought experiment time: Let us assume that you rest the board in such a manner that the angle between the edge of the board and the vertical wall is 45 degrees. The edge of the board is tangential to the corner of the wall and the upper floor, and you scribe the horizontal line, then cut it. When you now flip the board around so that the cut you made will rest flush against the ground, the other end will still be a line that's tangential to the 90-degree join between wall and upper floor; it won't be flush against the wall. For a 45 degree angle, you could go "oh, I'll just scribe a vertical line upwards where the board is tangential to the corner, and cut it." When you do this, you'll find the board may be flush to the ground, but it extends past the first floor, because you basically cut it too long. You could, by careful repeated cutting, shave off enough from the bottom to get it to fit flush to the floor, and flush to the wall... but that's a lot of cutting. Now, you could apply some simple (?) maths here, and realise that for a 45 degree angle, the answer is that the board has to be some multiple of square_root(2) long, but that's maths, and that's not allowed. :) Back to the physical approach. What if we did that horizontal cut, then rotated the board so that it became a vertical cut? Well, now it should be flush against the wall, but the end on the ground is resting on the corner of the board, not a face. You could cut it so that the "back" (furthest from the wall) corner was flush to the ground, but now the top of the board will be a few inches lower than the upper story. This is non-trivial :) It gets worse if you're not using a 45 degree angle which makes things symmetrical.
    • cricalix 9y ago
• lazyjones 9y ago
  Nice story (the first one) about the "top-down" approach, where you discover new complexity and choices at every level. Note how the discovery of new detail ends when you choose to use existing building blocks with known properties, based on experience (e.g. screws instead of examining which of the many possible ways of attaching parts would be most suitable). How simple this would be if you could buy pre-cut boards suitable for stairs at just the right angles and with holes drilled at optimal positions! Standardising and having a limited set of (appropriate, well-understood) choices at every level is key to building complex projects. Which is probably one of the reasons why software quality isn't really improving...
  • zaphar 9y ago
    When it comes to my day job building software I choose opinionated languages and libraries because they limit the choices I have to make which makes me more productive. But when I'm playing around in my off time I employee alternative ways of doing things with unusual or niche languages so I can explore details in more depth.
    • lazyjones 9y ago
      Same here. But I find code reuse problematic: people tend to build large libraries with complex APIs and too many options (typically also lacking sane defaults) instead of small, focused code "blocks" that can be well understood and tested and do one single thing very well. It's like having to fasten a nut and being offered 3 types of swiss army knives as your available tools. Same with operating systems, web development frameworks etc. ... Too many options, too little thorough understanding, stable interfaces.
• katzgrau 9y ago
  I've thought about this too, and generalizing to one more degree, I believe it comes down to perspective. The details are what keep you locked in that perspective. It's difficult, but invaluable, to truly see things from other perspectives. Once we begin learning the small details of one perspective, our minds seem to develop heuristics for quickly judging all things from that perspective. Attempting to see things from a different perspective slows us down and makes us uncomfortable. Citation needed, but I sincerely believe our intellectual difference are just a consequence of viewing things through many layers of varied perspectives. So for people who have considered global warming and believe it to be false, it really is false. That is reality. It's all subjective.
  • pas 9y ago
    Hawking uses the phrase "model dependent realism" for the small subatomic world. But of course it's perfectly valid for our highly complex human scale world too. And then why do we think the Sun is what we see in pictures? Of course it's that, but it's much more too, and since we don't capture a lot of that in our models (be them photos in various EM gamuts or neutrino counts or whatever numbers), but we only see the surface, we will never experience it up close. And the same goes for our experience of others' experiences, be it scholarly undertaking in unraveling the mysteries of Earth or simple carpentry/masonry/woodworking/sports. Even though hundreds of millions of people watch and tens of millions play soccer, no one really has the correct model about playing it on the professional (world cup, UK Premier League) level. Yet every one has a model of soccer, and of course that's their day to day reality. (And they of course do some imperfect subconscious belief update on their models as they go through life, but that's not much compared to an actual rational inquiry using the scientific method - but who has time for that for everything in the world?)
  • pixl97 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel >The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth; rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The implied individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel.
• pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  The suggestion to simply try and notice more detail seems tantamount to advising "just do it better". Why not ask someone who has done it before, or who does it for a living. There are many domains of human endeavour, but few with no experts. Experience is not necessarily expertise, but the experienced know what details to look for even if they don't know how to fix them. That to me is another problem of capitalism - people reserve knowledge in order to attract finance with its value; whilst the greatest good is to share that knowledge.
  • lamename 9y ago
    Agreed. But I interpreted part of his point to be: seek out the perspectives of others to help you notice new details.
• tmalsburg2 9y ago
  Great essay. Basically, they say that surprise doesn't tell us so much about the world but more about our model of the world. The degree of surprise can essentially be seen as a measure of our ignorance about some aspect of the world. As such surprise can serve as a guide for improving our understanding. However, it would be a mistake to see ignorance necessarily as a shortcoming. A simplifying model of the world is preferable if it gets the job done. In contrast to that, a perfectly accurate model of the world would render decision-making computationally intractable and is therefore not desirable.
• KineticLensman 9y ago
  There is an excellent example of this type of fiddly detail in Liz England's 2014 blog post about the problems of doors in video games [0]. She identifies about 20 questions you can ask about as a door (as a game designer) and then about 30 different roles (from sound designers [1] to monetization director[2]) who might be involved. Her post works really well because the example is so mundane but the questions are very valid. [0] http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/ http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/ [1] "I made the sounds the door creates when it opens and closes." [2] "We could charge the player $.99 to open the door now, or wait 24 hours for it to open automatically"
  • woliveirajr 9y ago
    > Network Programmer: “Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?” Brings me the question on wheter the "reality" is the same for everybody.
    • vidarh 9y ago
      In as much as information to our knowledge propagates no faster than speed of light in a vacuum, in one sense reality can not be the same for anyone.
    • BatFastard 9y ago
      The answer is NO. We all have our personal realities that operate on their own timeline. Only when you are playing an MMO next to someone do you get a chance to notice it. But it exists both in game and in real life.
    • cicero 9y ago
      Perception of reality is not the same for everybody, but there is a single objective reality that we all perceive in our imperfect ways.
      • mbrock 9y ago
        Is this "subjective perception" part of the "objective reality" or somehow outside of it?
• hyperpallium 9y ago
  Related: > Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one stumbles upon some obscure piece of information—often an unfamiliar word or name—and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. It was there all the time, you just didn't noticd it.
• mojuba 9y ago
  Two things that came to mind while reading this essay: - The effect of a surprise when facing unexpected complications/details is because our brains tend to simplify things, or rather simplify the model of the world that we maintain. When you first hear that water boils at 100º your brain really really wants to assume it's that simple, no more than that. Simplifications are crucial for optimising the brain's power consumption, which it tends to minimize all the time. - The amount of detail in human built stuff, as well as in our understanding of the world is a result of many centuries of perfecting and improving those things. Go a few millenia back and look at the stairs we were building then, they were awful. Or the fact that the process of boiling is so complex is a result of relatively recent discoveries in physics, just a few centuries ago. Funny thing is, the details of the reality around us will only get more complex over time. Suppose in a few centuries from now stairs will be so complex and so perfect that no individual will be able to build them on their own.
  • logfromblammo 9y ago
    Pure water boils at 100 ºC, in an environment at standard temperature and pressure, with sufficient vapor bubble nucleation sites. If you're a cook, you don't really need to know all that, because you either live up in the mountains (at lower pressure) or you don't. You either have hard water (with more dissolved ions) or you don't. And your pots are never scrubbed perfectly clean. Suppose that in a few centuries, stairs will have to account for different numbers of legs, or wheels, or different foot types, or varying amounts of gravity, or track gauge, or crystal habit, or effect on convection and ventilation, or whether classical Earth-standard humans will ever be expected to use them.
• hashkb 9y ago
  > you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. I disagree. With physical objects there is elbow grease; a reality mistake on the level of a typo is minor compared to a programming typo which is as good as having no program written at all.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• jasode 9y ago
  >Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? The author mentioned bicycles and inadvertently missed an opportunity to show another "unknown reality" that beautifully illustrates his point. Consider typical adults (not physicists) with 20+ years of bicycle riding. If you ask them, "how does a bicycle turn?", they'd respond that "you just lean into the direction of the turn and it turns." But that's not the complete picture of what actually happens.[1] If you were to capture the bicyclists with a high-speed camera, you'd notice that there's always a micro movement of countersteering to make the bike momentarily lose its balance and "fall into" the turn. Then there's an immediate correction of the steering to match the turn. This all happens in the span of milliseconds. Even though the human body "discovered" the countersteering by way of kinesthetic feedback, the bicyclists' brains don't explicitly communicate this intermediate step to others. (Tacit knowledge.[2]) It's not always the case that we "simplify" reality for innocent purposes of pedagogy. (E.g. we tell "lies" to children about "numbers", "functions", etc and as they get older, we successively remove the layers of lies as they get into high school and college math.) Instead, we often don't even know the reality (e.g. bicycle countersteering) to consciously omit it. That extra reality may not even be important. If one human is teaching another human, you can leave the "countersteering" detail out and it won't matter. The 200 years of people learning how to ride bicycles is evidence of that. However, if you're a robotics scientist and want to build a self-driven motorcycle, the reality of countersteering becomes a crucial detail. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llRkf1fnNDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llRkf1fnNDM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
  • jerf 9y ago
    See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 YouTube channel Smarter Every Day tries to ride a bike that has been hacked to reverse which way the wheel goes when the handlebars are turned, which also reveals how much bike riding skill is implicit. (I also experience the "clicking" he refers to around 6:10 when I switch between QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It takes about 15-30 seconds to switch, even after all the years I've been doing this, and I can "feel" it slide into place. This despite the fact that I use Swype (or whatever it is spelled as) on my phone all the time, which means I stay very familiar with the QWERTY layout every day... but somehow that qualifies as a different "thing", because I always get that instantly.)
• simias 9y ago
  This article points out exactly why even though I like to tinker with a lot of stuff my main hobby is always programming. Because programming is more akin to writing down maths than building a staircase. Algorithms don't warp because of humidity, algorithms don't have leakage current. Sure computers have their quirks (overflows, floating point issues, UB etc...) but it's still a finite amount of knowledge unlike the infinite amount of details of reality. An other pleasant part of software development is that all you need is a computer and a compiler/interpreter to get started. No need to buy dedicated tools or supplies. And if you realize halfway into a project that you did something wrong (that your "staircase" is not cut right) then you can easily undo and redo anything without any mess or waste. No cleanup needed either. The only limits are your skills and imagination.
  • slfnflctd 9y ago
    In fun, a contrary perspective: at least with woodworking tools, they don't become obsolete in 2-5 years just from laying dormant on the shelf! Seriously, though, couldn't agree more, I've said some variation on everything you mentioned for many years. Especially the mess part. I would add the risk of personal injury, too.
    • ballenf 9y ago
      Improperly cared for, however, and they will rust or worse. Over longer time spans, the tools sometimes become outdated in terms of one's productivity while using, assuming non-artistic motivation for use. Old motorized tools are more prone to this than mechanical-type tools. Which maybe gives some insight as to the factors that contribute to obsolescence. There are exceptions, of course, but generally my grandfather's hand tools are still perfectly serviceable while his motorized tools often have more drawbacks than benefits to use. A 50-year circular saw is as heavy as a boat anchor and is a huge pain in the ass to adjust and use compared to newer options.
  • the_cat_kittles 9y ago
    this is a great point. but i think all those negatives are actually positives for lots of people, creating fun challenged
• brndnmtthws 9y ago
  I've always thought the whole idea of virtual reality is strange. Why would I want to experience the world through VR when I can experience reality instead? I suppose there are exceptions where it makes sense. Maybe if someone is physically incapable of having an experience, or the risk is too high, but for the most part I derive more joy from actually going outside and doing stuff than playing a video game equivalent. To each their own, as they say. By the way: great post.
  • pqh 9y ago
    On top of that, the video games I play and enjoy are decidedly unreal and often intentionally simple or stylized.
  • ceejayoz 9y ago
    > Why would I want to experience the world through VR when I can experience reality instead? VR can let you experience neat things that are impossible or difficult to experience in reality. Visiting Paris means an eight hour flight and thousands of dollars; visiting Mars is currently impossible; fighting aliens may never be possible. "Why would you want to use VR for that" is a great criticism of "Using the Toilet Simulator 2019", sure, but it's a bit of a strawman.
  • LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    > physically incapable of having an experience, or the risk is too high, but for the most part I derive more joy from actually going outside and doing stuff than playing a video game equivalent. Or financially incapable of having the experience, or time constrained - and everyone is mortal and therefore time constrained. I don't anticipate using VR to experience a walk in the local park, or (personally) mountain biking on the local singletrack because those are things I can do in real life with much more fidelity and have a much better experience. However, I could understand taking a walk in a park on another continent (or six other continents in one afternoon), or advising a friend whom I've raved about mountain biking to try the trail in VR before buying expensive equipment. I'd rather have a compromise of some vast array of experiences across the world in low-detail VR, and also enjoy the limited amount of experiences I can enjoy in real life in full resolution, than to constrain myself to the small slice of the world that I can afford to physically experience.
• karmakaze 9y ago
  > The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important This. And how you could be pointing out something so self evident and it falls on deaf ears.
• foxhop 9y ago
  This is an incredible read, very thought invoking. I've never replaced stairs but I have learned enough of the "details" by repairing them (or being aware of them) to know it's a really hard to get right. A single 1/4 inch difference between two steps can feel wrong; a 1/2 inch difference and people will likely stumble or tumble down them on their first approach. Our intuition and pattern recognition impacts how we solve problems. Some call it "muscle memory" but it's not just in our muscles, it's in our unconscious thought. Like the author explains so well, once we move a detail into our unconscious it becomes part of us, transparent to us, "common sense"; and an unnoticed detail is completely hidden from us. The details of reality can only be taught through experience, because once understood, they move almost instantly from hidden -> transparent.
  • hornbaker 9y ago
    A gif of what happens when one step is just slightly too high: https://imgur.com/hl3YWJD https://imgur.com/hl3YWJD
    • dwaltrip 9y ago
      This was the perfect strange comedy for my Friday morning, thank you for sharing!
    • nlawalker 9y ago
      A favorite "today I learned" of mine is that staircases in medieval castles were constructed with steps of slightly different heights in order to trip invaders. In particular, the last step at the top of a staircase was tall, with the intent of causing a stumble and generating a loud footfall (for those sneaking around) or sending the intruder into the room headfirst (into a ready weapon, in the case of a siege).
    • asavadatti 9y ago
      Also interesting how people speed up after tripping.
      • foxhop 9y ago
• aj7 9y ago
  One thing I’velearned is that a bad design becomes more complex as you progress through it. Sometimes, the complexity grows to eventually make the whole design unfeasible, and you have to abandon it. In rare moments, designs become simpler as you progress. Irrelevant or neurotic features seem to melt away. That is bliss!
• dekhn 9y ago
  The term we use at work is "Reality has fractal complexity".
• vinceguidry 9y ago
  My answer to this problem is the same as it always was. Put it down, go take a walk. Come back with a fresh mind. The brain evolved to do this. Engineering is older than the human race.
• goatlover 9y ago
  And this is the reason I'm somewhat skeptical of predictions of future superhuman AI. The world is complicated and full of all kinds of details we overlook. Creating a general purpose AI that's able to bootstrap itself to being better than all humans at everything seems like ignoring all the difficulties it will run into. It's easy to imagine when not taking everything into account, but extremely hard to realize. And it's also why I think he paperclip maximizer and gray goo scenarios are silly. Maybe it's theoretically possible to create something that would eat the world, but in order to do so, it would have to overcome every obstacle the world throws at it. Again, easy to imagine, extremely hard to realize. All those details get in the way.
  • hwillis 9y ago
    If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them. An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and build a model from that. We would be able to do the exact same except we can't see inside our own brains and we have to study slow motion video and notice every little thing. The AI just sees oh, I turn the other direction slightly before initiating a turn. Voila, countersteering is discovered.
    • dingo_bat 9y ago
      Except looking inside a neural network is almost impossible. For example, google photos still turns mum if you search "gorilla". They could not figure out wtf was wrong with the recognition networks and had to just blacklist the keywords. https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google-photos-remains-blind/ https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google...
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        That's only an argument against using present-day neural networks as a basis for advanced AI. It's not a fundamental rule of reality that a mind can't understand its own internals.
• larrik 9y ago
  I've actually built a few staircases, and it's a ton harder than it even sounds here. In fact, there's apparently carpentry competitions and building a stairway to code is the grand finale. The way he does it, with the angle brackets? That's the easiest way, and by far the weakest. The strongest way is to notch out 2x12's (ideally at least 3, with one in the middle). Oh, and no step can be more than 1/8" difference in rise vs any other stair. This much harder, though. Combine this with the math to know how many steps you need, and what angle the stairs need to lean overall (this one he touches on), and it's a real pain. Fail, and people get hurt. Your body is pretty sensitive to stairs being perfect.
  • logfromblammo 9y ago
    They should do a tiebreaker/encore where the stair is also to be used by an achondroplastic dwarf with a stride length of 28". That requires some futzing with the comfort formulas, and still trying to make that work with code and average-height people.
  • dkarl 9y ago
    A dirty secret (?) is that a lot of the stairways you encounter are not built to code, either because they were built before current codes were put into place or because they were modified after inspection. A common practice is for certain required elements to be included in a way that makes them easy to remove. My girlfriend pointed out an instance of that to me recently — if you looked closely you could see that a handrail (the round bar you can hold onto while you walk on the stairs) had been mounted to the guardrail (the panel that makes it impossible to fall off the stairs sideways) and then removed. She said it was probably added to pass inspection because the guardrail, which was a very beautiful metal design, did not technically qualify as a handrail. Either the stairs failed inspection and the contractor temporarily fixed it up by adding the handrail, or more likely, the designer anticipated the inspection issue and included a cheap handrail for the owner (or more likely the contractor) to remove after inspection. Some people welcome the challenge of designing to code, but some people just resent it and circumvent it whenever they can.
  • twothamendment 9y ago
    Don't forget stairs that land on surface that is sloped from one side of the stairs to the other. What height should that bottom step be? Will the inspector measure both sides? Do you shoot for the middle being right on and each side being a bit too high and a bit too low? Watch the height on the first and last steps. The middle ones are the "easy" ones. In bigger cities there are companies that only frame stairs. It is amazing to watch them - they can do it in their sleep. I watched one crew finish up some complex stairs in less time than our framing crew would have spent making a game plan. There is detail in everything and until you've done that job you really don't notice it.
• sly010 9y ago
  A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be? Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Then actual delivery need to be scheduled on the phone. Every time. The pallets don't fit in the elevator after all, so need men to move boxes. Someone need to dispose of the pallets. The building doesn't have large item disposal. To assemble 60 desks we need men, tools, floor-plan, access to the building, etc. Someone has to clean up the packaging material. Then of course one of the 60 boxes were dropped, now damaged and needs replacing. Sending one box is a different game than sending 60. Even if you know what you are doing it takes a lot of emails and phone calls to outfit an office with furniture, and somehow everyone wants to communicate over phone or email, so automation is impossible. And that's how my e-commerce company turned into a service business wiped out all my profits :) (edited for typos)
  • le-mark 9y ago
    If you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.
    • tdb7893 9y ago
      As long as they would allow me to do it on company time it would be a nice distraction from work.
      • hinkley 9y ago
        I gotta say, I sorta miss assembling my own computer on the first day of work. I don’t miss the bloody knuckles though.
        • blaike 9y ago
• zzzeek 9y ago
  Here's what I think the most chilling takeaway is. People who have no appreciation for details do not know anything. They are dangerous people who will conclude incorrect things with certainty on a regular basis.
  • toss1 9y ago
    This seems particularly relevant to legislators and politicians, and much of the electorate.
  • krick 9y ago
    I would love to agree, because I always cared for details deeply. How can it be a bad personality trait? But later I started to reconsider that. The most effective high-level managers I know outrageously little care for details, as it seemed to me. When I was their subordinate it caused me a great deal of a problem. But then it dawned on me. Things somehow play out well in the end. Why? Well, because there I was, to care for details, to find solutions for what it seemed like an impossible problem to solve. If they cared for details as much as I did — we wouldn't even begin anything, because the amount of detail was so overwhelming. The general plan wouldn't be born in the first place. Now I sometimes wish I could care less for details and try to be... well, easier, I guess.
    • zzzeek 9y ago
      those managers had to care for at least the existence of details if they allowed you to do what was needed to honor those details. A truly "I dont care about details" manager would ask you to do something, you'd explain it cant be done that way for X, Y, Z, etc., and they'd say, "I don't care, do it anyway". A manager might not know the details of the thing you are doing for them, but they need to have an appreciation that details exist, which probably means they know about details from some other field they've been involved in, like sports, carpentry, art, or something else like that, such that they understand when someone says, "we need to do it this way because X, Y, Z", they know that those are details, you know them, and that's important to honor.
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Tieing knots. A lot more to it than diagrams suggest, if only because the hands have to learn the complicated movements while maintaining grip.
• lamename 9y ago
  Excellent points and very true to my experience. I like this. I like it so much I'm wary of it being the last word. Accounting for details & getting perspective elsewhere is incredibly important for solving problems. But with details alone in mind it's easy to fall into the trap of "there must be 1 more detail I'm missing" ad infinitum. If you do anything where you have to solve problems in a fixed period of time, it's important to decide when to pivot to a new, more productive problem (depending on the scale of your problem and freedom to change). Take this advice or learn it the hard way.
• skolos 9y ago
  > If your screws are longer than 2”, you’ll need different ones, otherwise they will poke out the top of the board and stab you in the foot. Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5" [1]. So your screws should be shorter than 1.5". [1] https://www.archtoolbox.com/materials-systems/wood-plastic-composites/dimensional-lumber-sizes-nominal-vs-actual.html https://www.archtoolbox.com/materials-systems/wood-plastic-c...
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > Actually nominal 2 inch lumber has thickness of 1.5" And, as I've recently learned, two-by-four is in fact 1½ × 3½ inches. How on Earth does that make sense? Why do people call things as if they were X, while knowing perfectly well they're not X? Is this an American thing?
    • wetmore 9y ago
      2x4 lumber is cut into rough boards in the milling process which are actually 2 by 4. These are dried (at which point they shrink) and planed (the wood will warp a bit during the drying process, jointing and planing will help correct this) so the resulting boards are smaller than their original 2x4 size. Some more surprising detail in reality :)
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Heh. I feel that reality is just that beautiful, never-ending fractal of annoyance...
    • atrus 9y ago
      2x4 are 2x4 when they are rough cut. The ones you buy at a hardware store have been jointed/planed to the 1.5x3.5in size.
• mirimir 9y ago
  Re boiling water in a metal pan: it's boiling when it stops making steam-cavitation noise.
• gwbas1c 9y ago
  I can't begin to count the number of times I've worked with an idea person who can't comprehend the details; or a product manager who can't work through high-level corner cases and expects that the computer can read his mind. This is a good read for either of those kinds of people.
• nlawalker 9y ago
  This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair boards. They follow through with that and finish the rest of the stairs with the same attitude. Now the stairs are finished and installed (shipped) - they look terrible, they're wobbly and too steep and everyone who walks on them in either direction trips. Then begins the never-ending process of in-place improvements: using a sander to even out the angles, grinding down the too-long screws that stick up, pounding on warped boards to straighten them out. We can't fix the angle or the poor spacing of the steps though, because everyone's gotten perversely used to it. When the whole house gets built this way, you live in a perpetual fixer-upper, where each component is either under revision or you've settled for it being "good enough" until enough work has been done to make everything else a little less broken.
  • GuiA 9y ago
    Frank Lloyd Wright: “You can bring an eraser to the drawing table, or a sledgehammer to the construction site”
  • Retric 9y ago
    "Why don't we just do this?" is incredibly valuable as long as it's not simply saying "We should do this!" If your building a house the best volume to surface area is going to be a sphere. Why don't we use that? Well it's a pain to work with curves. Well why not a Cube? It _ That _ is going to be a listing of the problems constraints, which most people can't simply list by thinking abstractly.
  • debt 9y ago
    "they look terrible" Well then don't do a shitty job? I mean if the budget is there, then yeah, just build me some stairs.
    • platz 9y ago
• drdrey 9y ago
  Everything is fractal. The more you zoom in on a detail, the more details appear. Therefore it is impossible to get anything done, there is always something to do beforehand
• YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  >> If you’re trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it. I know this article is not about AI, even remotely- but, oh my dog, it so is. It's like, you can do really well if you carefully select the borders of your problem domain- ImageNet, Go, Phenix, AZ; but when you try to use the same super powerful tools in an unconstrained situation (imagine a self-driving car in Mumbai; or playing Warcraft) then all those little noisy, unpredictable, unmodellable details in the real world kick your models' accuracy to the curb. In fact, I think most AI folks have figured this out by now and that this realisation is a very big reason why AI has advanced with leaps and bounds in recent years. But we're still up against impossible odds here. And this should be put to the attention of the Singularitarians- you don't know what you don't know yet. It might look like things are about to go exponential, but you never know what's behind the next bend. As Solon said to Croesus, "Count no man happy until the end is known".
• zafka 9y ago
  I really love the title of this essay. The essay itself and the comments are also delightful. I am going to start using this at my job (where I write embedded code for medical devices). This fact gets so much more apparent when code gets put in production devices, and you see the affect of tolerance stack-ups of hundreds of parts. I also think this is why i feel very optimistic about finding new and exciting things in the world. So many people accept the reality of things that someone has explained, while there are actually many variations yet to be revealed.
• jpfed 9y ago
  >If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. Wait, do programmers actually think that programming is fiddly? The fiddly part is always the concerns of the real-world domain; what's special to programming is the ability to use abstractions.
  • YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    Sure, but eventually you have to write a doubly-nested loop to walk over your abstractions. Which is rather a concrete thing to do.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Abstractions are, in their way, new things, and introduce further fiddliness. Consider these pieces of eternal wisdom from our industry: - https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks - https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 The author suggests that similar problems are a feature of pretty much everything humans do.
• Toast_25 9y ago
  TLDR: The curse of knowledge.
• gtallen1187 9y ago
  This was a great read, thank you!
• Xeoncross 9y ago
  > I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. > Reality has a surprising amount of detail You can't have it both ways. The amount of details, relative to your ability to perceive them all, is no-where near "mostly".
• RMGgondella 9y ago
  Brilliant AF. One of the hardest things to do is make difficult processes and systems accessible. This article achieves that with a simple discussion of building a staircase (no mean feat, first time) to step up to the springboard for a much larger idea. It's almost as if observing the staircase details renders a scaleable model fractal that gets to measurement of a learning curve. I wonder if, by observing the details of one's own most difficult task, focusing on the time to learn each detail and assemble one's own model, an overall speed for learning ANY difficult task, done by a particular person could be calculated. That could be a valuable tool for measuring human potential, particularly in apprentice-type learning. The value of the time and the effort put into the apprenticeship -- to both the apprentice and the master craftsman -- could be assessed before hand. Achievement baselines could be set closer to reality; or it could be decided that the apprenticeship would not be worth the time and effort. But that last decision could be made on firmer ground, data-wise. Da Vinci, I would suggest, was a great observer of detail; he was also pretty good at math, science, engineering, and architecture. But it all started with drawing -- observing the most minute of detail, in all it's imperfection, then transferring that to paper. As an artist, he also learned to sort of standardize many of the imperfections -- or at least the use of the tool to represent those imperfections on paper or canvas. The painting method he galvanized, sfumato, eschewed hard lines in nature, and worked hard to achieve the soft edge. I wonder if da Vinci saw the irrationality of pi as evidence that a circle has no true "edge," but that a circle was instead equidistant points stretching out in a small infinity, particular to a specif object The downside of observation might be wrapped up in this last, though. Because the casual observer of a circle, presuming that there is a definite, finite edge to a circle could lose their faith in the dimensional space we've grown up perceiving (four dimensions.) This might be okay for a mathematician, a scientist, or an artist. To a suburban husband with a mortgage and a minivan, it might be terrifying. The observation might completely unmoor him, and send him drifting off. Nature is like that. The infinite diversity of nature, at say, the class, order, genus, species, or individual level can be maddening to try to take in. Looking above, at "animal, mineral, vegetable" compounds that exponentially. How those pieces work together to build a staircase, or a giraffe, or a seam of granite, or the savanna of Africa, is the heart of scientific -- and artistic -- inquiry. Thanks, John Salvatier, for a provocative and insightful article.
• SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  I am reminded of three texts: "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy" by Wayne R. Moore[1], Tektronix's "Low Level Measurement Handbook"[2] and LTC Application Note 47 "High Speed Amplifier Techniques"[3]. All three deal with systems at the limits of precision, whether mechanical, electrical, or temporal. Say you want to measure a length. Easy right? Just take a measuring tape or ruler and put it next to the thing to be measured. But what if you need really high accuracy over a reasonably long distance. Say, to within a tenth of a millimeter (100 μ) over a meter long distance or more. Now temperature matters: your scale will expand differently than the object being measured if they aren't the same material. Humidity has similar effects. Traditional length standards were metal bars, but metal bars sag under their own weight, changing the distance between the ends. Modern standards use interferometers to create a length standard, but those require very good mirrors and monochromatic light sources for proper operation. That's without getting into electronic measurement systems for the interferometers, and the required sensitivity there... And you still need a way to transfer the accuracy from the interferometer to a practical measuring scale. That brings back concerns of temperature. Human handlers transfer heat, leading to local expansion. Light is absorbed differently by objects of different color, leading to different expansion. Etc. The further you try to push the accuracy and precision the more details start to matter, and the more disciplines start to get involved. [1] http://mooretool.com/publications.html http://mooretool.com/publications.html (it can be found on Gen Lib, but is worth the price) [2] https://www.tek.com/document/handbook/low-level-measurements-handbook https://www.tek.com/document/handbook/low-level-measurements... [3] https://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an47fa.pdf https://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an47fa.pdf
  • wetmore 9y ago
    Reminds me of the difficulty of measuring the heights of mountains like Everest.
• joe_the_user 9y ago
  "You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing." This is a great point. It has another corollary that people who are good X approach aren't necessarily good judges of whether approach X is good. The standard answer to "that seems like an excessively complex way to do it" is generally "that because you don't have experience with doing it the right way" and that could be right or it could be wrong. Often, the experienced and the inexperienced have about equal chance to guess on the meta-level whether this is true. When OOP was the next big thing, a whole array of people defended against objections with arguments around those not liking it "doing it wrong", which we now, mostly, know were ridiculous right? Of course we know...
• andyidsinga 9y ago
  I've worked with academics over the years - people who are much smarter than me. During that time, I've heard on more than one occasion a phrase that goes something like this "a month in the lab saves an hour in the library". My response, was usually quote the Car Talk guys "Reality often astonishes theory" The irony, and subject of endless entertaining remarks on the show was that Tom Magliozzi had a PhD.
• monktastic1 9y ago
  I'm reminded of the coastline paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox "The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines."
• paraschopra 9y ago
  This actually has parallels to how I recommend finding startup ideas: observing the reality and noticing anomalies and surprises. Here's my writeup: https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-for-anomalies/ https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-f...