10 ms·

One Tenth of a Second

210 points by apsec112 5y ago

nine_k 5y ago
Scroll right to the numbered list; it's fascinating: questions of scientific objectivity, the idea of psychology study, cinematogrpahy, statistics, continuity of reality, etc all arising from the need to observe events at a precision of 0.1s.
- nwatson 5y ago
  The author also wrote an excellent perspective on management/worker relationships and other corporate shenanigans called "The Gervais Principle" [0], set against the series "The Office.". It's definitely opinionated. [0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - genewitch 5y ago
    I read the whole thing yesterday and it's more about culture and how the majority of people in groups manage interpersonal things. The pontificating on what drives the founders and c-levels kind of goes into the weeds a bit. I was hoping for more concrete examples of the types of speech, as well. But the culture parts of the essays was quite thought-provoking.
  - ekster 5y ago
    I find it’s a bit dated now, at a high level interesting but he really zooms in on the details until it becomes a kind of nonsense. It was interesting to read and think about when it came out, but I don’t really think it is correct, predicts anything in any meaningful way, or even provides a coherent strategy to manipulate others if that’s the path you want to go down in the first place.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      Yeah, when I first read it I thought of it as an interesting and fun theory that was a good read, but I didn't think it was necessarily meant as truth as much as a tool to look at the series and examine it and use ideas and themes presented. For example, I remember the idea of the Losers explained was fairly eye-opening for me. Regardless of the name, the fact that they were a largely savvy group that just chose an entirely different trade-off and decided to treat their jobs purely as a means to an end so they could focus on things they cared about clicked with me in a way that hadn't really before. I mean, I'd worked jobs like that, with a slightly different aim, as a teenager and while going to college, but I was so focused on getting a job more aligned with my interests (which I was lucky enough to do partway through college) that it skewed my view of work and the people around me. The idea of "Losers" made a few things click for me, by linking the middle class expansion of the middle 20th century, the massive manufacturing sector, and the people that were able to live great middle-class lives because of it. These "Losers" are people that have carved out their own little chunk of that dream, and are consciously putting the requisite amount of effort in to not be fired and/or feel like they aren't absolute shit at their job, as nothing more or nothing less is really needed for them to meet their real goals, which are not work related. There's something to envy in that. Does that mean everyone fits in the categories presented, or that all the categories are accurate in all or even most respects? No, but nevertheless, as a prism with which to compare and reassess my own experiences, I found it extremely useful.
      - haraball 5y ago
        I found this blog post [1] on twitter where people were looking for literature on "office politics". It has some good points: > Instead, I think of them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has done to them: Broken the losers, tricked the clueless, and forced the sociopaths into ethical conundrums. > To be specific, I propose that we name the losers, clueless and sociopaths to “pragmatists, idealists and opportunists.” Their roles, relationships and dynamics remain the same ... [1]: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/
  - dylan604 5y ago
    "and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space." whoa! The Office elvates so far above Office Space? I'm going to have to disagree.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      Eh, all the relationships and characters in The Office are far richer and more complex than Office Space, and experience real growth and change over the series. Honestly, I view it as one of the best comedic series ever produced. I only caught up and finished the second half of it a year or so ago, so it's still fresh in my mind.
gumby 5y ago
The second itself is a recent division. Originally the Babylonian clock split day and night each into 12 equal segments -- thus the length of an hour was different at night and day, and varied each day. The concepts of minutes (small part) and seconds (even smaller part) is quite modern -- about a thousand years old, despite being broken into 60 (those Babylonians were quite influential!); once you do that you can continue into even smaller fractions but it was all pretty abstract. Seconds only became interesting about 500 years ago when the clock technology could finally represent them, but they've only been useful for the last 250 years or so. So having .1 s (not .1s!) be interesting 130 years ago is itself interesting, and reflects the state of technology (not science) of the time.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > So having .1 s (not .1s!)… What does this distinction mean?
  - positr0n 5y ago
    Maybe gumby is talking about the difference between 0.1s as a time duration vs the concept of time durations with tenths of a second precision? I have trouble parsing it too.
  - blaze33 5y ago
    Probably the common typographic rule prescribing a space between the numerical value and its unit (cf. https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2794/40139 https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2794/40139).
    - aj7 5y ago
      Which is utterly dying.
      - gumby 5y ago
        Certainly not in science and engineering.
abathur 5y ago
Not exactly ot, but I enjoy following Venkatesh on Twitter (https://twitter.com/vgr https://twitter.com/vgr). There is a fair bit of self-reflexive/recursive terminology to sort through, but I guess the best way to put it is that he's just a promiscuous thinker--and the amount of in-the-clear thinking he does throws its fair share of sparks.
texaslonghorn 5y ago
Interestingly, 0.1s/note = 10 notes per second is approaching the upper limit of how many notes per second a musician can competently/clearly play on a string instrument!
- rrherr 5y ago
  Yes, checks out! Pro bluegrass banjo players can play 150-160 beats per minute, 4 notes per beat (16th notes), so that’s 10-11 notes per second max.
- snvzz 5y ago
  Rhythm games focus on this, with some crazy hit rates and bursts.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Adam Neely has explored this. 20 Hz is the lower bound of human hearing, a/k/a 20 beats/second. Any faster than that, and beats blur into a constant tone. https://youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8 Different phenomena and physical senses have different temporal distinction rates. Smell is probably among the slowest. Touch (really a collection of senses from pressure, heat, cold, vibration, proprioception, pain, and possibly others), ranges from slow (heat/cold) to fast (vibration). Visual range gets close to the 1/10th of a second described in the article, though some changes may be slower, others (usually based on flicker or interference patterns) may give even higher resolution, though an upper bound of 1/100th, possibly 1/1000th of a second (strobe effects) is probably the extreme, and that's already special cases outside typical (and certainly evolutionary) experience.
GuB-42 5y ago
I always say that important scientific discoveries arise from better tools. Once technology can make the tool, it doesn't take long for the discovery to be made. It may take a genius, but there are a lot of geniuses on Earth. Without precision instruments, how can we know that light has a speed, that stars are not points of light on a crystal sphere surrounding the earth, that diseases are carried by microbes... General relativity was a way to solve anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, something only detectable with precise measurement. Without it, general relativity would make no sense: why use all these complex formulas when Newton gravity works just as well? Send Einstein's work to the 16th century and it will be slashed by Occam's razor. The "tenth of a second" problem is just that, technology able to measure tenth of seconds opened new fields. I don't mean that technology is more important than scientific research, but they go hand in hand, no good science without good observation, no good observation without good tech, and no good tech without good science.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  You are completely right. New discoveries rely on engineering breakthroughs. And engineering breakthroughs rely on new discoveries
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - aaron695 5y ago
    I'd disagree with this tight relationship. I bought an air filter, it has a PM 2.5 meter on it. Everyday I'm discovering and understanding what drives PM2.5 in my house. It's not really an engineering breakthrough, you could loophole it to PM2.5 meters are getting cheaper. But really to me, it's the measurement, just better data. I could have bought a PM 2.5 meter years ago but culture held me back. I personally don't believe in working from home, but if you did, once again the tech has existed for a while there's no real breakthrough happening. Get the tools to the people. Why is there no free easy to use OCR (Tesseract = PITA), I don't think a breakthrough or discovery is needed there.
treeman79 5y ago
I recall many years ago playing Team Fortress. 100ms ping time was decent. But whenever it got the 30ms range my score kill / death ratio would skyrocket. They later implemented code to stop low pingers from dominating. Same thing with mouse. Wireless mouse feels unnaturally sluggish to me now. Was years before I realized that it wasn’t just in my mind and most gamers use wired.
- snvzz 5y ago
  Most people underestimate the effects of latency. If 0.1s makes any sense (as in humans processing 10 events per second), which I do honestly doubt, then 100ms -> 30ms still means that the other party is almost one full event behind. That's massive.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    Most people haven't played Quake/UT/CS competitively. Btw, with modern games 30ms isn't just one full event/server tick behind. Multiplayer shootets do have 100 or higher tick rates now, so 30 would be more like 3 cycles behind
    - snvzz 5y ago
      I meant human ticks, not server ticks. Still, it only goes to show it matters at so many levels. Like, if using a 60Hz screen with 30ms latency, you're always almost 2 frames behind, so you always react 2 frames late, compared to another 60Hz screen person at the same ping with, say, 2ms latency.
- teddyh 5y ago
  So you're the LPB! https://web.archive.org/web/20050214193844/http://archive.gamespy.com/dailyvictim/index.asp?id=194 https://web.archive.org/web/20050214193844/http://archive.ga...
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Nice. I used to have a full size house fan pointing at my open team Fortress server. If I recall more the 8 people and it would overheat anyways.
sundvor 5y ago
And in (sim/real) car racing, we are constantly seeking tenths. :) Take Laguna Seca, 11 corners. If one could find a tenth in each, one would be a very significant 1.1 seconds faster per lap. Small fractions of time, what an interesting topic.
- keithnz 5y ago
  watching the Olympics and seeing some of the 100ths of a second differences in finishes is really fascinating. For the losing athlete, it must be mind numbing thinking that the tiniest of tiny things done slightly different would have changed the result
paulpauper 5y ago
Meh..sounds unfocused and scattershot judging by the summary. No interesting characters or stories. would not want to read
- parsecs 5y ago
  Well, don't read it then..
javajosh 5y ago
It seems inevitable and natural that it would be dramatic as we venture beyond our comfy zone of time between .1s and 10^9s - I'm not sure why the lower end is getting all the love here. Geology, anyone? Cosmology? It's also funny that the OP mentions astronomy as the origin of the .1s problem, but doesn't mention, you know, machinery. Engines (internal combustion or otherwise) were cycling in the .1 - .001s range in the 19th century. And in terms of the challenges of modernity, isn't the biggest modern challenge, not just to time, psychology, or physics, but to the entire notion that knowledge be organized and expanded upon by succeeding generations when institutional integrity declines and the proliferation of baseless speculation and idle daydreams is allowed to mascarade as legitimate academic content? We humans are stuck in our time and place, at all time scales. At the high end, there is no escaping the light cone. And I'm never going to experience nanosecond time. We exist at this level of zoom, and unaided humans are stuck here. So what? We range out with our imperfect instruments. No sane person is asserting that telescopes and microscopes are eyes. We get born, recapitulate what our ancestors learned, use their tools, build our own, and push back the veil of ignorance a little. What's the big whoop?
Causality1 5y ago
the failure to come to terms with the 0.1s limit in human cognition gave birth to modernity I wonder what exactly he means by that. Sure, eyes may start betraying you at faster speeds but human cognition is in no way limited to one tenth of a second. For example, speedrunners reliably hit 1/60 of one second actions, and I'm sure many other human endeavors require similarly fast thinking.
- csours 5y ago
  The hand is faster than the eye - you can do things quicker than you can perceive doing them. One time I reacted to a snake before I realized I saw the snake. There are also problems with laying down memories. As the author of the post says, we still have trouble nailing this down in the modern day.
  - jfoutz 5y ago
    Not long ago I realized there's a whole bunch of stuff I just "make up" about the world. The "me" part of my brain knows I blink. I know I'm blind, but I don't remember it at all. Turns out it's actually worse thanks to being blind while my eyes rotate in their sockets. "saccades". There's some machinery grinding away all the time, making up little stories about the world to maintain a consistent view. I spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time wondering where else I'm blind. The snake thing is cool. I know I have some hardwired reflexes around heat and pain. I can't think of a case where I've exercised the "hidden monster" reflex, but I believe you, and I probably have it, or something like it.
    - sk0g 5y ago
      I play indoor football regulary, both as a goalkeeper and as a defender. It's similar to the full 11v11 game, but on a much smaller pitch, and thus much quicker. I can't count the number of times I've performed (useful) actions, to then almost be stunned for a moment as I reconcile what happened. The one I remember most vividly is a ball that was passed right at me from across the pitch. I knew my teammate kicked it, but I thought it was a shot towards goal at first. I couldn't see till about 2 metres away from me as it was across a defensive line, but it was a driven, pacy pass towards me. I stuck out a foot to kick it into goal very tidily, before I even registered that the pass was actually coming towards me. Feels like time slowing down around you for half a second, pretty cool.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
There's something about this guy's style of prose that I find deeply unreadable. Edit: I think I've figured it out. If there's a complicated way to say something simple, he takes the complicated way. If there's a rarely seen word he can substitute where a common word will do, he uses the rarely used word. His prose reads heavy, but the ideas in it are light. This is like the exact opposite of Paul Graham. His prose is easy, but I find deep and actionable knowledge in many things he writes.
nielsbot 5y ago
Slightly off-topic (as usual), but this reminds me of the book Einstein's Dreams. Different ways of thinking about time. "The book consists of 30 chapters, each exploring one dream about time that Einstein had during this period." The chapters are versions of the world where time has different rules. In one, the closer you get to the town square, the slower time moves. In another, people build higher and higher houses, since you age more slowly the higher you are from the surface of the Earth. And so on... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams
eCa 5y ago
I have not seen it mentioned either here or in the article[1], but in 100 metres (and the other sprint disciplines) a reaction time faster than 1/10 of a second is considered a false start[2]. [1] I might have missed it, though. [2] https://www.worldathletics.org/disciplines/sprint-event/100-metres https://www.worldathletics.org/disciplines/sprint-event/100-...
jvandonsel 5y ago
I’d be interested in reading the book, but $33 for the ebook from Amazon? What’s up with that?

210 points by apsec112 5y ago

Scroll right to the numbered list; it's fascinating: questions of scientific objectivity, the idea of psychology study, cinematogrpahy, statistics, continuity of reality, etc all arising from the need to observe events at a precision of 0.1s.

nwatson 5y ago
The author also wrote an excellent perspective on management/worker relationships and other corporate shenanigans called "The Gervais Principle" [0], set against the series "The Office.". It's definitely opinionated. [0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- genewitch 5y ago
  I read the whole thing yesterday and it's more about culture and how the majority of people in groups manage interpersonal things. The pontificating on what drives the founders and c-levels kind of goes into the weeds a bit. I was hoping for more concrete examples of the types of speech, as well. But the culture parts of the essays was quite thought-provoking.
- ekster 5y ago
  I find it’s a bit dated now, at a high level interesting but he really zooms in on the details until it becomes a kind of nonsense. It was interesting to read and think about when it came out, but I don’t really think it is correct, predicts anything in any meaningful way, or even provides a coherent strategy to manipulate others if that’s the path you want to go down in the first place.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Yeah, when I first read it I thought of it as an interesting and fun theory that was a good read, but I didn't think it was necessarily meant as truth as much as a tool to look at the series and examine it and use ideas and themes presented. For example, I remember the idea of the Losers explained was fairly eye-opening for me. Regardless of the name, the fact that they were a largely savvy group that just chose an entirely different trade-off and decided to treat their jobs purely as a means to an end so they could focus on things they cared about clicked with me in a way that hadn't really before. I mean, I'd worked jobs like that, with a slightly different aim, as a teenager and while going to college, but I was so focused on getting a job more aligned with my interests (which I was lucky enough to do partway through college) that it skewed my view of work and the people around me. The idea of "Losers" made a few things click for me, by linking the middle class expansion of the middle 20th century, the massive manufacturing sector, and the people that were able to live great middle-class lives because of it. These "Losers" are people that have carved out their own little chunk of that dream, and are consciously putting the requisite amount of effort in to not be fired and/or feel like they aren't absolute shit at their job, as nothing more or nothing less is really needed for them to meet their real goals, which are not work related. There's something to envy in that. Does that mean everyone fits in the categories presented, or that all the categories are accurate in all or even most respects? No, but nevertheless, as a prism with which to compare and reassess my own experiences, I found it extremely useful.
    - haraball 5y ago
      I found this blog post [1] on twitter where people were looking for literature on "office politics". It has some good points: > Instead, I think of them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has done to them: Broken the losers, tricked the clueless, and forced the sociopaths into ethical conundrums. > To be specific, I propose that we name the losers, clueless and sociopaths to “pragmatists, idealists and opportunists.” Their roles, relationships and dynamics remain the same ... [1]: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/
- dylan604 5y ago
  "and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space." whoa! The Office elvates so far above Office Space? I'm going to have to disagree.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Eh, all the relationships and characters in The Office are far richer and more complex than Office Space, and experience real growth and change over the series. Honestly, I view it as one of the best comedic series ever produced. I only caught up and finished the second half of it a year or so ago, so it's still fresh in my mind.

gumby 5y ago

The second itself is a recent division. Originally the Babylonian clock split day and night each into 12 equal segments -- thus the length of an hour was different at night and day, and varied each day. The concepts of minutes (small part) and seconds (even smaller part) is quite modern -- about a thousand years old, despite being broken into 60 (those Babylonians were quite influential!); once you do that you can continue into even smaller fractions but it was all pretty abstract. Seconds only became interesting about 500 years ago when the clock technology could finally represent them, but they've only been useful for the last 250 years or so. So having .1 s (not .1s!) be interesting 130 years ago is itself interesting, and reflects the state of technology (not science) of the time.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> So having .1 s (not .1s!)… What does this distinction mean?
- positr0n 5y ago
  Maybe gumby is talking about the difference between 0.1s as a time duration vs the concept of time durations with tenths of a second precision? I have trouble parsing it too.
- blaze33 5y ago
  Probably the common typographic rule prescribing a space between the numerical value and its unit (cf. https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2794/40139 https://english.stackexchange.com/q/2794/40139).
  - aj7 5y ago
    Which is utterly dying.
    - gumby 5y ago
      Certainly not in science and engineering.

abathur 5y ago

Not exactly ot, but I enjoy following Venkatesh on Twitter (https://twitter.com/vgr https://twitter.com/vgr). There is a fair bit of self-reflexive/recursive terminology to sort through, but I guess the best way to put it is that he's just a promiscuous thinker--and the amount of in-the-clear thinking he does throws its fair share of sparks.

texaslonghorn 5y ago

Interestingly, 0.1s/note = 10 notes per second is approaching the upper limit of how many notes per second a musician can competently/clearly play on a string instrument!

rrherr 5y ago
Yes, checks out! Pro bluegrass banjo players can play 150-160 beats per minute, 4 notes per beat (16th notes), so that’s 10-11 notes per second max.
snvzz 5y ago
Rhythm games focus on this, with some crazy hit rates and bursts.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Adam Neely has explored this. 20 Hz is the lower bound of human hearing, a/k/a 20 beats/second. Any faster than that, and beats blur into a constant tone. https://youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=h3kqBX1j7f8 Different phenomena and physical senses have different temporal distinction rates. Smell is probably among the slowest. Touch (really a collection of senses from pressure, heat, cold, vibration, proprioception, pain, and possibly others), ranges from slow (heat/cold) to fast (vibration). Visual range gets close to the 1/10th of a second described in the article, though some changes may be slower, others (usually based on flicker or interference patterns) may give even higher resolution, though an upper bound of 1/100th, possibly 1/1000th of a second (strobe effects) is probably the extreme, and that's already special cases outside typical (and certainly evolutionary) experience.

GuB-42 5y ago

I always say that important scientific discoveries arise from better tools. Once technology can make the tool, it doesn't take long for the discovery to be made. It may take a genius, but there are a lot of geniuses on Earth. Without precision instruments, how can we know that light has a speed, that stars are not points of light on a crystal sphere surrounding the earth, that diseases are carried by microbes... General relativity was a way to solve anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, something only detectable with precise measurement. Without it, general relativity would make no sense: why use all these complex formulas when Newton gravity works just as well? Send Einstein's work to the 16th century and it will be slashed by Occam's razor. The "tenth of a second" problem is just that, technology able to measure tenth of seconds opened new fields. I don't mean that technology is more important than scientific research, but they go hand in hand, no good science without good observation, no good observation without good tech, and no good tech without good science.

beebeepka 5y ago
You are completely right. New discoveries rely on engineering breakthroughs. And engineering breakthroughs rely on new discoveries
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron695 5y ago
  I'd disagree with this tight relationship. I bought an air filter, it has a PM 2.5 meter on it. Everyday I'm discovering and understanding what drives PM2.5 in my house. It's not really an engineering breakthrough, you could loophole it to PM2.5 meters are getting cheaper. But really to me, it's the measurement, just better data. I could have bought a PM 2.5 meter years ago but culture held me back. I personally don't believe in working from home, but if you did, once again the tech has existed for a while there's no real breakthrough happening. Get the tools to the people. Why is there no free easy to use OCR (Tesseract = PITA), I don't think a breakthrough or discovery is needed there.

treeman79 5y ago

I recall many years ago playing Team Fortress. 100ms ping time was decent. But whenever it got the 30ms range my score kill / death ratio would skyrocket. They later implemented code to stop low pingers from dominating. Same thing with mouse. Wireless mouse feels unnaturally sluggish to me now. Was years before I realized that it wasn’t just in my mind and most gamers use wired.

snvzz 5y ago
Most people underestimate the effects of latency. If 0.1s makes any sense (as in humans processing 10 events per second), which I do honestly doubt, then 100ms -> 30ms still means that the other party is almost one full event behind. That's massive.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Most people haven't played Quake/UT/CS competitively. Btw, with modern games 30ms isn't just one full event/server tick behind. Multiplayer shootets do have 100 or higher tick rates now, so 30 would be more like 3 cycles behind
  - snvzz 5y ago
    I meant human ticks, not server ticks. Still, it only goes to show it matters at so many levels. Like, if using a 60Hz screen with 30ms latency, you're always almost 2 frames behind, so you always react 2 frames late, compared to another 60Hz screen person at the same ping with, say, 2ms latency.
teddyh 5y ago
So you're the LPB! https://web.archive.org/web/20050214193844/http://archive.gamespy.com/dailyvictim/index.asp?id=194 https://web.archive.org/web/20050214193844/http://archive.ga...
- treeman79 5y ago
  Nice. I used to have a full size house fan pointing at my open team Fortress server. If I recall more the 8 people and it would overheat anyways.

sundvor 5y ago

And in (sim/real) car racing, we are constantly seeking tenths. :) Take Laguna Seca, 11 corners. If one could find a tenth in each, one would be a very significant 1.1 seconds faster per lap. Small fractions of time, what an interesting topic.

keithnz 5y ago
watching the Olympics and seeing some of the 100ths of a second differences in finishes is really fascinating. For the losing athlete, it must be mind numbing thinking that the tiniest of tiny things done slightly different would have changed the result

paulpauper 5y ago

Meh..sounds unfocused and scattershot judging by the summary. No interesting characters or stories. would not want to read

parsecs 5y ago
Well, don't read it then..

javajosh 5y ago

It seems inevitable and natural that it would be dramatic as we venture beyond our comfy zone of time between .1s and 10^9s - I'm not sure why the lower end is getting all the love here. Geology, anyone? Cosmology? It's also funny that the OP mentions astronomy as the origin of the .1s problem, but doesn't mention, you know, machinery. Engines (internal combustion or otherwise) were cycling in the .1 - .001s range in the 19th century. And in terms of the challenges of modernity, isn't the biggest modern challenge, not just to time, psychology, or physics, but to the entire notion that knowledge be organized and expanded upon by succeeding generations when institutional integrity declines and the proliferation of baseless speculation and idle daydreams is allowed to mascarade as legitimate academic content? We humans are stuck in our time and place, at all time scales. At the high end, there is no escaping the light cone. And I'm never going to experience nanosecond time. We exist at this level of zoom, and unaided humans are stuck here. So what? We range out with our imperfect instruments. No sane person is asserting that telescopes and microscopes are eyes. We get born, recapitulate what our ancestors learned, use their tools, build our own, and push back the veil of ignorance a little. What's the big whoop?

Causality1 5y ago

the failure to come to terms with the 0.1s limit in human cognition gave birth to modernity I wonder what exactly he means by that. Sure, eyes may start betraying you at faster speeds but human cognition is in no way limited to one tenth of a second. For example, speedrunners reliably hit 1/60 of one second actions, and I'm sure many other human endeavors require similarly fast thinking.

csours 5y ago
The hand is faster than the eye - you can do things quicker than you can perceive doing them. One time I reacted to a snake before I realized I saw the snake. There are also problems with laying down memories. As the author of the post says, we still have trouble nailing this down in the modern day.
- jfoutz 5y ago
  Not long ago I realized there's a whole bunch of stuff I just "make up" about the world. The "me" part of my brain knows I blink. I know I'm blind, but I don't remember it at all. Turns out it's actually worse thanks to being blind while my eyes rotate in their sockets. "saccades". There's some machinery grinding away all the time, making up little stories about the world to maintain a consistent view. I spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time wondering where else I'm blind. The snake thing is cool. I know I have some hardwired reflexes around heat and pain. I can't think of a case where I've exercised the "hidden monster" reflex, but I believe you, and I probably have it, or something like it.
  - sk0g 5y ago
    I play indoor football regulary, both as a goalkeeper and as a defender. It's similar to the full 11v11 game, but on a much smaller pitch, and thus much quicker. I can't count the number of times I've performed (useful) actions, to then almost be stunned for a moment as I reconcile what happened. The one I remember most vividly is a ball that was passed right at me from across the pitch. I knew my teammate kicked it, but I thought it was a shot towards goal at first. I couldn't see till about 2 metres away from me as it was across a defensive line, but it was a driven, pacy pass towards me. I stuck out a foot to kick it into goal very tidily, before I even registered that the pass was actually coming towards me. Feels like time slowing down around you for half a second, pretty cool.

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

There's something about this guy's style of prose that I find deeply unreadable. Edit: I think I've figured it out. If there's a complicated way to say something simple, he takes the complicated way. If there's a rarely seen word he can substitute where a common word will do, he uses the rarely used word. His prose reads heavy, but the ideas in it are light. This is like the exact opposite of Paul Graham. His prose is easy, but I find deep and actionable knowledge in many things he writes.

nielsbot 5y ago

Slightly off-topic (as usual), but this reminds me of the book Einstein's Dreams. Different ways of thinking about time. "The book consists of 30 chapters, each exploring one dream about time that Einstein had during this period." The chapters are versions of the world where time has different rules. In one, the closer you get to the town square, the slower time moves. In another, people build higher and higher houses, since you age more slowly the higher you are from the surface of the Earth. And so on... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein's_Dreams

eCa 5y ago

I have not seen it mentioned either here or in the article[1], but in 100 metres (and the other sprint disciplines) a reaction time faster than 1/10 of a second is considered a false start[2]. [1] I might have missed it, though. [2] https://www.worldathletics.org/disciplines/sprint-event/100-metres https://www.worldathletics.org/disciplines/sprint-event/100-...

jvandonsel 5y ago

I’d be interested in reading the book, but $33 for the ebook from Amazon? What’s up with that?