12 ms·

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

290 points by jger15 5y ago

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
This is why robotics is hard! Every problem seems simple but there’s a bunch of detail everywhere and even simple problems are super difficult.
seeken 5y ago
So how do you trace the stair cuts?
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  exercise for the reader
glenstein 5y ago
To me, one of the more interesting arguments against the universe as a simulation came from Sean Carroll. I'm paraphrasing, but he noted that any simulation would be limited and it's possible detail, because it has to use the resources of the real world, and therefore is likely to be less detailed than the real world. And the logic of simulated universes is that they, too, have simulated universes, and you keep on going, and you end up with much greater probability that you're in one of the simulations then that you're in reality. But, it would also follow, that the version of reality that you experience is not very rich in detail relative to whatever is "real." The author, John, says that blindness to detail can make you "intellectually stuck." So I would wonder if an implication of Sean Carroll's argument, an implication of the universe as a simulation, is that we would experience less detail and therefore be more prone to getting "stuck".
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  That is nonsense. We can do "unlimited" detail, by just-in-time generating details on observation and extrapolating from some mathematical deterministic constants tail. Not everything that can be seen, needs space- lots of it can be reproduced with formulas just in time on observation. The only observable thing would be a "detail snap" and the same "high-res" details were the same hash is produced. Which could be avoided by hashing in the observer, at some level of detail.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    Carrol calls it the "Resolution Conundrum" [0]. If you believe in the underlying logic that there is a kind of runaway effect, of simulations within simulations, etc, it's inevitably going to be the case that the most probable simulated universe is the one with the least available computing power. So whatever trickery you use to get around the problem of low resolution just substitutes one problem for another, and then the new thing runs up against limits of computing power. We would be most likely to experience the simulation that's most likely to generate noticeable artifacts as the simulation runs up against limits. 0: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-we-do-not-live-in-a-simulation-the-resolution-conundrum/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-w...
    - MayeulC 5y ago
      It could also be that the most probable simulated universe is one in which it is very hard to simulate other universes. We do 2D simulations, games of life, etc. If our universe is simulated, why wouldn't the "parent" one be vastly more complex (more dimensions) and a much better place to run simulations? It could be highly hyperdimensional and contain unimaginable levels of detail, even "time" in our universe could be a construct (or multidimensional) in the parent universe.
    - coremoff 5y ago
      the thing that I don't understand is why people think that there would be a simulation of a universe; surely it would be more likely that this is a simulation of "you" (well me as obviously you lot aren't real) - vastly simpler and more plausible
      - OneTimePetes 5y ago
        In a simulation, would make the idea of a simulation inconceivable not be the best recursion prevention?
  - Retric 5y ago
    No we can go deep but no where near unlimited zoom. Watch a video that shows a fractal zoom to say 10^20,000 and that feels like forever but it’s nothing next to 10^(10^20,000) let alone anything actually large. Even seemingly simple problems run into surprising issues when you want arbitrary precision. What’s the one’s place digit of π^(π^(π^π)? I mean sure you could fake unlimited zoom by just picking arbitrary numbers like say 4, but that’s no longer zoom.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? It’s an interesting theory though but I’m not quite sure I buy the detail resolution argument as the one that defeats it, rather similar to Descartes in that you can’t trust your senses it’s hard to care about, especially with no proposed test (which wouldn’t the test be part of the simulation too?). So you kind of run into the “well who created that kind of marathon and I don’t know of any philosophical conjectures that have those characteristics that have been solved. Could be wrong though.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    >Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? I largely agree with where you're at on this. What we experience as normal might be extremely low detail relative to some more detailed underlying reality. However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. So it seems like there's room to go "further down". I also don't necessarily think it's a decisive argument, but what's interesting to me is that argument in particular stresses detail, and what it has in common with this article leads to an implication that we're more likely to get "stuck" in a cognitive sense, so that there are shapes to our thinking that correspond to the level of detail we're able to experience.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      > However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. Do we? I'm not trying to do the Socratic Method here with endless questioning but how can I know or experience what less detail means? Don't I only have access to all of the detail I could have access to by definition?
      - glenstein 5y ago
        I take the notion of "resolution" to relate to things such as the range of visible color, complexity of shapes and sounds. If you agree with that assumption (and you don't have do) that details are of that nature, you can always conceive of less, but not necessarily more.
- magneticspark 5y ago
  And to add to the sibling reply by OneTimePetes, even if the simulation had to generate a nearly infinite amount of details, the simulation itself could have its internal time slowed down, and the beings inside the simulation would not be able to perceive it as such.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    The problem is with finding an argument as to why, as a matter of principle, we would expect simulations to be accompanied by such fixes. If you buy into the bootstrapping premises (which I don't!) that simulations beget more simulations, and that this runs into limits of computing power, there are clear and consistent principles driving that runaway process. However, so far as I can tell, it's not clear that there would be any principle leading us to conclude that there would be a standardization of simulations relating to image hashing or fiddling with the experience of time. Those types of fixes would fall into the category of idiosyncratic details that either would or wouldn't hold in particular one-off scenarios, and don't generalize into any transcendant probabilistic implication that such experiences are most likely. That kind of generalization is what would be necessary for it to be responsive to the argument about simulations.
- rocqua 5y ago
  This always makes me think of the 'uncertainty principle' and quantized values in physics. As a layman, it seems to me like both of these combine to limit the amount of information needed to describe the state of the universe. I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to check if this makes sense. My wild imagination suggests that 'waveform collapse' could be modeled as the result of a simulation being forced to resolve a state of a specific particle for further calculations. I imagine it is hard to come up with a plausible 'simulation model' for this that includes features like probability wave interference and entanglement of particles. Such a model would be amazing for insight into quantum mechanics, and also have far-reaching consequence for metaphysics. It would strengthen the argument for us living in a simulation, if the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can be modeled as artifacts of a particularly efficient emulation.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  It seems almost touchingly naive to assume that a superuniverse would have similar limitations as this one. We don't know anything about how different universes might be structured. That's not just because we can't access them, but because a superuniverse system assumes a coherent set of metalogic that makes certain universe features possible and other features impossible/unlikely Not only can we not access that, there's absolutely no justification for generalising from this universe to any metasystem in any way. Especially if you accept the premise that this simulation has less detail than the original. Because then of course you don't know what detail is missing, or what detail is possible. So that argument nicely destroys itself.
  - randomsearch 5y ago
    Hmm maybe, but also what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? A good reason to simulate a universe would be to ask “what if?” questions, which would seem of greatest utility to those living in similar universes…
    - htrp 5y ago
      Or our universe may literally be a game of dwarf fortress running on commodity hardware. These are all similar to the epistemological arguments of unknowable truths. Interesting but ultimately fruitless.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        >dwarf fortress Ridiculous! It's much more probable that our universe is a game of Factorio being played by an idiot.
    - JackFr 5y ago
      > what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? So your argument is Genesis 1:27? "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them" Big, if true.
- dsego 5y ago
  There is a fun little esoteric/new age youtube video* about reality glitches that explain how reality is (in loose terms) more "mathematical" in nature than "material" (as we mostly perceive it). These are the reasons mentioned: 1) speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit 2) wave/particle duality 3) conservation of energy - everything is eternal, nothing can be truly created or destroyed 4) quantum entanglement shows that reality is non-local 5) singularities at center of black holes where seemingly all physical laws break down [*] https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg
  - wruza 5y ago
    Ugh nope. This video is not only too naive at the intro (could be just a watchbait), it further doesn’t explain what it claims, neither is it consistent nor starting from any preexisting model. It starts from limited factoids and uses them as fundamentals to go to some crazy not-even-a-hypothesis. E.g. in GR the conservation of energy is an “it really depends” thing, not a universal law. And c is not a galactic speed you or your flashlight may “hit”. To save a stranger some time on c-part to make their own idea of this video, it’s right in the intro and then at 11:30+.
  - coremoff 5y ago
    I've only watched the the first five minutes of that video; I think he has some fundamental misconceptions that make it difficult to take much from what he's saying. e.g. for #2 wave/partical duality (which isn't necessarilly even a thing, depending on what foundation of QM you subscribe to) he says that everything is energy and that energy is light; this is not correct (the 2nd part) for #3 energy is not necessarily conserved over long time frames in our universe #4 depends on which foundation of QM you subscribe to, but doesn't necessarily require non-locality (AIUI, if your foundation results in this problem, then you must chose between locality or reality to explain things - reality in this context not really meaning what it might mean in common parlance) #5 singularities appear in black holes because the maths breaks down because we don't have a unified theory of QM+gravity; they aren't magical. Also the big bang wasn't a singularity in the way he seems to be implying, again AIUI I'm no expert, but I would suggest you review some more technical videos before reading too much into the link you posted (I suggest PBS Space Time / FermiLab / Sabine Hossenfelder)
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I don't know, humans exist, comparative to the most granular levels of reality, at a macroscopic level. That leaves plenty of room for lost detail in a simulated universe within ours that being at our scale would never really notice. Separately, how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? We all do sometimes-- how would we ever know if it's more or less than "normal" in an non-simulated universe? Carrol is a physicist so he may have more technical reasoning grounded in physics-- I don't know-- but it sounds like a rhetorical rather than scientific justification.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    >how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? I never said we aren't prone to getting stuck, in fact I was trying to suggest the opposite although maybe I wasn't very clear. A possible implication of being in a simulation, if we are in one, is that maybe we're more likely to get "stuck." That possibility was the very connection between this article and Sean Carroll's argument that led me to make my comment.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Certainly we get stuck sometimes. How do you know that it's less often than in a simulation? Perhaps on a non-simulated universe there is *no* getting stuck. Or it happens so little as to be a virtually unknown concept. Relative to a universe higher up we might be getting stuck constantly. The entire idea is a counterfactual with absolutely no way of evaluating it as evidence for the opinion that we're not simulated. It may even be true that successive layers if embedded universes would have more problems of that sort, but we still lack any way to establish that our own rate is the baseline. Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation.
      - glenstein 5y ago
        >I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out what the terms mean. Of course it's difficult to reason in cases with vague terms. Where I part with you is in the conclusion you draw from the vagueness. You rattle off a string of questions, to each of which my response would be along the lines of "good question! How we answer that depends on XYZ, I think this is more likely, this is less likely. In this case you do this, in that case you do this other thing, etc." For me, those kinds of questions are prompts that allow you continue a constructive conversation in a spirit of good faith and intellectual curiosity. It's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it, and all that. But you don't seem to want to have the questions engaged with or answered so much as you want to use them in a performative expression of helplessness to show that the whole exercise is doomed. To me that's skipping about 3, 4, or 5 steps in the middle. >Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation. Again, you're chasing ghosts. Before you said "how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck?" when I had never suggested we are not prone to getting stuck. Now you're saying can't "be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation." I agree! It is speculative. Where is this disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're responding to coming from?
_Microft 5y ago
Submitted a few times, discussed twice with a considerable number of comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 (2020; 115 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 (2018; 296 comments)
uniqueuid 5y ago
I always use the title of this wonderful essay to explain how "AI" works. Deep neural architectures are so performant (in part) because they make use of all these minuscule details which our brains shield us from seeing.
- simion314 5y ago
  Can you provide an example because I do not understand. Say some small detail that humans did not see because it was so small and our brain ignored it. For me ANN represent a more complex, giant function that we "interpolated" with tons of data , give same problem to some smart people and sometimes they will gtive you the exact solution with a proof.
bobthechef 5y ago
There is a tacit presupposition here that needs to be made explicit if we are not to betray it, namely, the distinction between properties and attributes. A property is something that follow from the essential nature of a thing. A mere attribute is something that isn't and could vary without contradicting the essential nature of a thing. So a property of triangles, following from Triangularity, is that its angles sum to 180 degrees. But the color of a triangle is an attribute that does not follow from its Triangularity. It may be important in some context, but it must be understood as secondary (of course, in a secondary way, you could say that it does tell us that the thing in question is capable of having that attribute, but the attribute itself is not the consequence of its essential nature). A specialist can suffer from the law of instrument for analogous reasons. If you put an immunologist in charge of policy, he may reduce the common good to merely those things with immediate and obvious immunological relevance to him. Sure, freedom from infection is important to the common good, but it isn't the only thing and indeed optimizing for that in excess incurs an enormous cost to the common good. Our education system, sadly, does not prepare us in foundational ways to reason and understand properly and this lack of intellectual and moral discipline can manifest in fixations (undisciplined passions, like in this case fear, can produce these fixations).
mauvehaus 5y ago
And if you think stairbuilding is complex, you should look into handrailing [0] The money quote from the article: "I’ve learned that the correct way to build a house is to design the handrail first, then design the stair, and the rest of the house will follow." Part of the reason you don't notice the complexity of everyday things is that humans have spent thousands of years perfecting the details and methods that let you take your stairs and handrails for granted. And, like, 90% of everything else. The McMaster-Carr catalog isn't >2" thick because they're trying to confuse you. It's that thick because everything they sell solves a different problem, that somebody worked out the details in years ago, and we live in a world where the experience and solutions embodied in every part gets mass produced and delivered the next day for the cost of mere money. And then there are manufactured handrail parts, which are a grotesque and simplified perversion of a properly carved handrail (discussed in the link). But at least regular people can afford a handrail for their stairs for safety too. [0] https://www.thisiscarpentry.com/2009/07/15/drawing-a-volute/ https://www.thisiscarpentry.com/2009/07/15/drawing-a-volute/
- dsr_ 5y ago
  The no-code people imagine that we are on the verge of living in a world where that catalog's equivalent in software is just a few months away. If they were right, it still wouldn't solve the problem analysis problem, but it would certainly help out the parts problem. It would also help move software into a professional engineering phase.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Well, they are going to be disapointed when they'll realize we haven't even figured out the catalog yet. Software is half a century old, we are still using flint to produce it. The only reason it looks fancy is because it makes more sparks, and a lot faster.
    - Verdex 5y ago
      We're just starting to get out of the alchemy stage right now. Wise men and magicians everywhere telling royalty that if they only pay them treasures that they will reveal the future and show them miracles. Meanwhile it turns out that NSS has a straight-forward vulnerability that everyone just somehow missed. If you look at the history of chemistry, mechanical engineering, or astronomy then you kind of get the impression that we're probably 150-300 years away from software development working the way everyone already imagines it working.
snowwrestler 5y ago
> I kept arguing because I thought I was right. I felt really annoyed with him and he was annoyed with me. In retrospect, I think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and I don’t think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and see if you can figure it out), he just heard ‘let’s draw some diagrams and compute the angle’ and didn’t think that was the solution, and if he had appreciated the thing that I saw I think he would have been more open to drawing some diagrams. But at the same time, he also understood that diagrams and math don’t account for the shape of the wood, which I did not appreciate. If we had been able to get these points across, we could have come to consensus. If you want to understand the value of “soft skills” like communication, it’s right here. Being able to understand that there are different points of view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost anyone. Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience.
- an9n 5y ago
  > Being able to understand that there are different points of view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost anyone. > Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience. This strikes me as highly ironic given the incredible narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses over recent years. Try seriously challenging the doctrine and one is liable to be cancelled, reprimanded, chucked off a course - even physically attacked.
  - ok_dad 5y ago
    Please don't start flame-war topics on HN. This is way out of scope for the article. The GP was simply saying that when you study the humanities, you read a lot of different POVs, and those help you to understand that your way of thinking might not always be perfect, or the best, but that there are many angles to looking at a problem. Thanks! > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I know a guy, just builds stairs. Every significant house builder in the area has him in, all the work he wants. Heard him say on the phone "I have so much work, If I don't want to do a job I don't have to do it. And I don't want to do that. Thanks!"
- newsbinator 5y ago
  Sounds like he's not charging enough
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I'm not sure the best equilibrium is "I can barely get enough work to fill my time". That's a very brittle position. Better to have some buffer and then you're able to turn away jobs you don't like. Maybe you leave 10% on the table, but if times get lean you don't want all of your prospects to dry up because "That guy charges way too much".
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      I'd say like with all freelancers and contractors, it's "I can't double my rates because then I'd lose half my business".
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        Everyone has to find the sweet spot in their customer's price elasticity.
4monthsaway 5y ago
Aha that was different than I expected
teraflop 5y ago
The "colonizing the universe" diagram seems to be taken from this paper: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/space-races-settling.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/space-races-sett...
strict9 5y ago
This was a great read. Another way to appreciate the endless level of detail if you look hard enough is the Coastline Paradox[1], an idea expanded and articulated by Benoit Mandelbrot. Life has infinite levels of depth if you keep peeling back layers and look down a bit further. And when you think you know something, dig deeper and you realize you know less than you thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
- adamrezich 5y ago
  I have no formal education in physics or metaphysics or anything but it has long seemed obvious to me that reality is infinitely fractal in both the macro and micro. whenever a new particle or whatever is discovered, it seems like many people get excited that we're on the verge of understanding the elementary fundamental building blocks of reality or something, when I can't see any reason not to believe that reality will continue to be fractal infinitely when "zooming in." if one can accept this, then one can accept that any perceptions about reality he may have can only be at best a "useful model," and such models should be constantly updated in response to new data and observations. of course, this means that there is quite a bit of incentive in deliberately shaping the models people use to perceive reality...
  - mersenne 5y ago
    If the universe is infinitely large (as we suspect it is), then it should also be infinitely small (even beyond our capacity to measure it). Otherwise, it's not really infinite.
    - avhon1 5y ago
      The matter of whether the universe is or isn't infinite is definitely not a settled matter. > Because we cannot observe space beyond the edge of the observable universe, it is unknown whether the size of the universe in its totality is finite or infinite. Estimates suggest that the whole universe, if finite, must be more than 250 times larger than the observable universe. Some disputed estimates for the total size of the universe, if finite, reach as high as 10^10^10^122 megaparsecs, as implied by a suggested resolution of the No-Boundary Proposal. [1] Secondly, rays (the geometric construct that have a point origin and extend infinitely in one direction) are infinitely long, but any point on them is finitely far away from the end. Why couldn't the universe be the same way -- unbounded in one direction (of scale), but bounded in the other? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size_and_regions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size_and_regions
jedimastert 5y ago
For some fun historical context, checkout Moxon's "Mechanick Exercises" or Nicholson's "Mechanic's Companion", which are both treatises on various tradecrafts (including carpentry and joinery, which is where stairs would come in) around the late 1600s and early 1800s, respectively. Those two books essentially serve as the foundation for the modern hand-tool woodworking movement. I mention this because "Lost Art Press" is currently on the front page, who are an independent woodworking book publisher near the front of this movement
an9n 5y ago
I thought about this the other day, thinking about how (some) people look down on other people and pat themselves on the back for being more knowledgable, better educated, more sophisticated, having better taste, being better bred (I'm from the UK lol) etc etc. But then there is always someone above one, looking down on one with the same arrogant prejudices. Who are these people that look down on me as an ignorant, blundering oaf, and what would I need to learn to fit in? Not that even if I did know what I was missing I would make the effort, heh.
bena 5y ago
Is it weird that I don't like his stairs? Also, I don't know many people that build wooden stairs with brackets. Usually, you get two pieces of suitably long and wide lumber, clamp them together, and cut them together. So it looks something like this (https://www.lowes.com/pd/Severe-Weather-4-Step-Pressure-Treated-Pine-Deck-Stair-Stringer/1000127671 https://www.lowes.com/pd/Severe-Weather-4-Step-Pressure-Trea...). This solves most of his problems. Basically, I get his point, but I think he chose a really poor example to illustrate it. All I'm hearing from this guy is: "I've never actually had to build stairs."
- beervirus 5y ago
  Cutting stringers instead of using brackets would implicate pretty much exactly the same set of details and problems.
javier10e6 5y ago
To make matters worst, what you see with your open eyes, is not one image, is a collection of images with all kind of distortions, blur and other smudges that your brain "photoshop" away to produce an image that conforms to the flawed/bias criteria that your brains considers to be a good image. The same happens with your ears and your taste buds. Reality in our brains is pure poetry.
kordlessagain 5y ago
If you want to know how much reality gots, build a house by yourself.
f154hfds 5y ago
I recently had to build some stringers for a deck. We had an original CAD with 11 steps (for a total of 12 including the top). When we produced the layout somehow we ended up laying out 10 steps instead of 11 because I wanted a specific tread depth (~10 inches). I figured why would one fewer step matter for anything structural? Well it turns out that 10% extra cut into my 2x12 left about an inch less in the beam of wood which was enough for a 12' span to bounce as you walk up and down! I have learned that a universal unavoidable element to any model is that it oversimplifies the thing it is trying to explain. Sometimes that is OK and using the model we gain useful insight into a system. Other times the simplification of the model ruins its explanatory power. Academics can sometimes forget this I think in their eagerness to understand and explain things. Some models that have varying degrees of usefulness are the following: Newton's F=ma, supply and demand economics, Marxism vs capitalism, colonialism, post modernism, globalism vs nationalism, conservatism vs liberalism. We have to be very careful applying an overly simplistic model to complex phenomena. Sometimes our desire to understand something at a high level erodes our ability to understand it at all, especially when modeling human behavior where interactions fundamentally occur at the level of the individual. Colonialism in my mind is a good example of this. We have a model (a simplification of reality) that says this is a specific time period in human history in which people groups migrated between areas trampling on indigenous cultures in the process. The reality is that this has happened since the dawn of civilization and will continue, that some colonists at some times respected the native peoples and the movement was mutually beneficial. I believe colonialism as a model has limited usefulness and it's much more useful to look at specific movements of peoples and what happened as a result.
agustif 5y ago
On stairs, I remember watching about this one on Ancient Aliens or something like that, lol https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-helix-staircase-loretto-chapel-001295 https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
setgree 5y ago
This is now the 12th time this has been posted on HN [0], and I see why, it is very insightful. But his other post, 'submission and dominance among friends,' had more impact on me. Connecting our behavior to our mammal relatives like he does is not exactly novel, but combined with his frankness about his own needs -- especially the profoundly uncool desire to be "on the submissive end of this kind of clear status play" -- the piece was revelatory for me. Perhaps you'll enjoy: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-among-friends http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
BWStearns 5y ago
Kind of a weird tangent but can anyone elaborate on this quote: "trap a drop of water between two other liquids and heat it, you can raise the temperature to at least 300 °C with nothing happening" I knew you could change boiling point with pressure but is this suggesting that doing something like having a layer of oil on top of an ambient pressure pot of water would prevent boiling? I tried googling for some elaboration but only found discussions of superheating water via pressure changes.
- garof 5y ago
  I'm not sure of the experiment that this might be referring to, but it sounds like superheating[0]. Trapping the drop of water between two other liquids could be some version of a "clean container, free of nucleation sites" as described in the first paragraph of the wikipedia article. Other ideas? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating
N1H1L 5y ago
In fact this is why self-driving cars are so hard! A complete newbie driver faces all of these tiny issues, which they learn to forget as they become practiced. There are so many subtleties in these scenarios, that it's mind boggling.
yoyar 5y ago
No single person understands everything about how a pencil is made.
- ilyagr 5y ago
  In case somebody doesn't know the reference: https://mises.org/library/i-pencil https://mises.org/library/i-pencil
Animats 5y ago
Making stuff to specified dimensions has a well understood workflow. Order of operations matters. That problem dominates machining. It's a big deal for carpentry, too. It's not hard. Most people figure it out before the second time they build something. (Although making anything stay at specified dimensions from Home Depot "fresh from the tree" lumber is difficult. That is why kiln-dried lumber exists.) Wooden boat tension joinery - now that's hard. You need the results of several centuries of puzzle-solving and dealing with the effects of water to do that well. There was some article a few years back on HN about two incompetents trying to build a cabin in the woods, with too little experience, too little planning, and too much drinking. Their worst mistake is that they didn't know that you build roof trusses at ground level. (Or just buy them prebuilt.) Then hoist completed trusses into place. They were trying to stick-build roof trusses up in the air at roof level. That did not end well. This stuff isn't rocket science. There are books easily available, and lots of people who've done it before.
- conover 5y ago
  You are thinking of this article, which was a good read: https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/friends-diy-cabin-build-washington/ https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/friends...
ineedasername 5y ago
Not quite anything to do with reality. More just about how seemingly simple things (stairs) actually are more complicated. That isn't much of a revelation? Although it seems like plenty of startups looking to disrupt something run headlong into the issue. Anyway, I think a more proper title is something like "Everything is More Complicated That it Looks"

290 points by jger15 5y ago

This is why robotics is hard! Every problem seems simple but there’s a bunch of detail everywhere and even simple problems are super difficult.

seeken 5y ago

So how do you trace the stair cuts?

TremendousJudge 5y ago
exercise for the reader

glenstein 5y ago

To me, one of the more interesting arguments against the universe as a simulation came from Sean Carroll. I'm paraphrasing, but he noted that any simulation would be limited and it's possible detail, because it has to use the resources of the real world, and therefore is likely to be less detailed than the real world. And the logic of simulated universes is that they, too, have simulated universes, and you keep on going, and you end up with much greater probability that you're in one of the simulations then that you're in reality. But, it would also follow, that the version of reality that you experience is not very rich in detail relative to whatever is "real." The author, John, says that blindness to detail can make you "intellectually stuck." So I would wonder if an implication of Sean Carroll's argument, an implication of the universe as a simulation, is that we would experience less detail and therefore be more prone to getting "stuck".

OneTimePetes 5y ago
That is nonsense. We can do "unlimited" detail, by just-in-time generating details on observation and extrapolating from some mathematical deterministic constants tail. Not everything that can be seen, needs space- lots of it can be reproduced with formulas just in time on observation. The only observable thing would be a "detail snap" and the same "high-res" details were the same hash is produced. Which could be avoided by hashing in the observer, at some level of detail.
- glenstein 5y ago
  Carrol calls it the "Resolution Conundrum" [0]. If you believe in the underlying logic that there is a kind of runaway effect, of simulations within simulations, etc, it's inevitably going to be the case that the most probable simulated universe is the one with the least available computing power. So whatever trickery you use to get around the problem of low resolution just substitutes one problem for another, and then the new thing runs up against limits of computing power. We would be most likely to experience the simulation that's most likely to generate noticeable artifacts as the simulation runs up against limits. 0: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-we-do-not-live-in-a-simulation-the-resolution-conundrum/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe-w...
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    It could also be that the most probable simulated universe is one in which it is very hard to simulate other universes. We do 2D simulations, games of life, etc. If our universe is simulated, why wouldn't the "parent" one be vastly more complex (more dimensions) and a much better place to run simulations? It could be highly hyperdimensional and contain unimaginable levels of detail, even "time" in our universe could be a construct (or multidimensional) in the parent universe.
  - coremoff 5y ago
    the thing that I don't understand is why people think that there would be a simulation of a universe; surely it would be more likely that this is a simulation of "you" (well me as obviously you lot aren't real) - vastly simpler and more plausible
    - OneTimePetes 5y ago
      In a simulation, would make the idea of a simulation inconceivable not be the best recursion prevention?
- Retric 5y ago
  No we can go deep but no where near unlimited zoom. Watch a video that shows a fractal zoom to say 10^20,000 and that feels like forever but it’s nothing next to 10^(10^20,000) let alone anything actually large. Even seemingly simple problems run into surprising issues when you want arbitrary precision. What’s the one’s place digit of π^(π^(π^π)? I mean sure you could fake unlimited zoom by just picking arbitrary numbers like say 4, but that’s no longer zoom.
ericmay 5y ago
Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? It’s an interesting theory though but I’m not quite sure I buy the detail resolution argument as the one that defeats it, rather similar to Descartes in that you can’t trust your senses it’s hard to care about, especially with no proposed test (which wouldn’t the test be part of the simulation too?). So you kind of run into the “well who created that kind of marathon and I don’t know of any philosophical conjectures that have those characteristics that have been solved. Could be wrong though.
- glenstein 5y ago
  >Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know we aren’t stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe? Stuck in our minds? I largely agree with where you're at on this. What we experience as normal might be extremely low detail relative to some more detailed underlying reality. However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. So it seems like there's room to go "further down". I also don't necessarily think it's a decisive argument, but what's interesting to me is that argument in particular stresses detail, and what it has in common with this article leads to an implication that we're more likely to get "stuck" in a cognitive sense, so that there are shapes to our thinking that correspond to the level of detail we're able to experience.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it is for a world to be less detailed than our own. Do we? I'm not trying to do the Socratic Method here with endless questioning but how can I know or experience what less detail means? Don't I only have access to all of the detail I could have access to by definition?
    - glenstein 5y ago
      I take the notion of "resolution" to relate to things such as the range of visible color, complexity of shapes and sounds. If you agree with that assumption (and you don't have do) that details are of that nature, you can always conceive of less, but not necessarily more.
magneticspark 5y ago
And to add to the sibling reply by OneTimePetes, even if the simulation had to generate a nearly infinite amount of details, the simulation itself could have its internal time slowed down, and the beings inside the simulation would not be able to perceive it as such.
- glenstein 5y ago
  The problem is with finding an argument as to why, as a matter of principle, we would expect simulations to be accompanied by such fixes. If you buy into the bootstrapping premises (which I don't!) that simulations beget more simulations, and that this runs into limits of computing power, there are clear and consistent principles driving that runaway process. However, so far as I can tell, it's not clear that there would be any principle leading us to conclude that there would be a standardization of simulations relating to image hashing or fiddling with the experience of time. Those types of fixes would fall into the category of idiosyncratic details that either would or wouldn't hold in particular one-off scenarios, and don't generalize into any transcendant probabilistic implication that such experiences are most likely. That kind of generalization is what would be necessary for it to be responsive to the argument about simulations.
rocqua 5y ago
This always makes me think of the 'uncertainty principle' and quantized values in physics. As a layman, it seems to me like both of these combine to limit the amount of information needed to describe the state of the universe. I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to check if this makes sense. My wild imagination suggests that 'waveform collapse' could be modeled as the result of a simulation being forced to resolve a state of a specific particle for further calculations. I imagine it is hard to come up with a plausible 'simulation model' for this that includes features like probability wave interference and entanglement of particles. Such a model would be amazing for insight into quantum mechanics, and also have far-reaching consequence for metaphysics. It would strengthen the argument for us living in a simulation, if the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can be modeled as artifacts of a particularly efficient emulation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It seems almost touchingly naive to assume that a superuniverse would have similar limitations as this one. We don't know anything about how different universes might be structured. That's not just because we can't access them, but because a superuniverse system assumes a coherent set of metalogic that makes certain universe features possible and other features impossible/unlikely Not only can we not access that, there's absolutely no justification for generalising from this universe to any metasystem in any way. Especially if you accept the premise that this simulation has less detail than the original. Because then of course you don't know what detail is missing, or what detail is possible. So that argument nicely destroys itself.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  Hmm maybe, but also what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? A good reason to simulate a universe would be to ask “what if?” questions, which would seem of greatest utility to those living in similar universes…
  - htrp 5y ago
    Or our universe may literally be a game of dwarf fortress running on commodity hardware. These are all similar to the epistemological arguments of unknowable truths. Interesting but ultimately fruitless.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      >dwarf fortress Ridiculous! It's much more probable that our universe is a game of Factorio being played by an idiot.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > what about the argument that the most likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a universe like ours? So your argument is Genesis 1:27? "So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them" Big, if true.
dsego 5y ago
There is a fun little esoteric/new age youtube video* about reality glitches that explain how reality is (in loose terms) more "mathematical" in nature than "material" (as we mostly perceive it). These are the reasons mentioned: 1) speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit 2) wave/particle duality 3) conservation of energy - everything is eternal, nothing can be truly created or destroyed 4) quantum entanglement shows that reality is non-local 5) singularities at center of black holes where seemingly all physical laws break down [*] https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg
- wruza 5y ago
  Ugh nope. This video is not only too naive at the intro (could be just a watchbait), it further doesn’t explain what it claims, neither is it consistent nor starting from any preexisting model. It starts from limited factoids and uses them as fundamentals to go to some crazy not-even-a-hypothesis. E.g. in GR the conservation of energy is an “it really depends” thing, not a universal law. And c is not a galactic speed you or your flashlight may “hit”. To save a stranger some time on c-part to make their own idea of this video, it’s right in the intro and then at 11:30+.
- coremoff 5y ago
  I've only watched the the first five minutes of that video; I think he has some fundamental misconceptions that make it difficult to take much from what he's saying. e.g. for #2 wave/partical duality (which isn't necessarilly even a thing, depending on what foundation of QM you subscribe to) he says that everything is energy and that energy is light; this is not correct (the 2nd part) for #3 energy is not necessarily conserved over long time frames in our universe #4 depends on which foundation of QM you subscribe to, but doesn't necessarily require non-locality (AIUI, if your foundation results in this problem, then you must chose between locality or reality to explain things - reality in this context not really meaning what it might mean in common parlance) #5 singularities appear in black holes because the maths breaks down because we don't have a unified theory of QM+gravity; they aren't magical. Also the big bang wasn't a singularity in the way he seems to be implying, again AIUI I'm no expert, but I would suggest you review some more technical videos before reading too much into the link you posted (I suggest PBS Space Time / FermiLab / Sabine Hossenfelder)
ineedasername 5y ago
I don't know, humans exist, comparative to the most granular levels of reality, at a macroscopic level. That leaves plenty of room for lost detail in a simulated universe within ours that being at our scale would never really notice. Separately, how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? We all do sometimes-- how would we ever know if it's more or less than "normal" in an non-simulated universe? Carrol is a physicist so he may have more technical reasoning grounded in physics-- I don't know-- but it sounds like a rhetorical rather than scientific justification.
- glenstein 5y ago
  >how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck? I never said we aren't prone to getting stuck, in fact I was trying to suggest the opposite although maybe I wasn't very clear. A possible implication of being in a simulation, if we are in one, is that maybe we're more likely to get "stuck." That possibility was the very connection between this article and Sean Carroll's argument that led me to make my comment.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Certainly we get stuck sometimes. How do you know that it's less often than in a simulation? Perhaps on a non-simulated universe there is *no* getting stuck. Or it happens so little as to be a virtually unknown concept. Relative to a universe higher up we might be getting stuck constantly. The entire idea is a counterfactual with absolutely no way of evaluating it as evidence for the opinion that we're not simulated. It may even be true that successive layers if embedded universes would have more problems of that sort, but we still lack any way to establish that our own rate is the baseline. Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation.
    - glenstein 5y ago
      >I mean that you have no benchmark to evaluate the relative metric of how stuck we get. Well I only just posed the idea, and a lot would depend on working out what the terms mean. Of course it's difficult to reason in cases with vague terms. Where I part with you is in the conclusion you draw from the vagueness. You rattle off a string of questions, to each of which my response would be along the lines of "good question! How we answer that depends on XYZ, I think this is more likely, this is less likely. In this case you do this, in that case you do this other thing, etc." For me, those kinds of questions are prompts that allow you continue a constructive conversation in a spirit of good faith and intellectual curiosity. It's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it, and all that. But you don't seem to want to have the questions engaged with or answered so much as you want to use them in a performative expression of helplessness to show that the whole exercise is doomed. To me that's skipping about 3, 4, or 5 steps in the middle. >Considering that physicists themselves lack consensus on the question, I don't see how one physicist's philosophical musing on the topic can be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation. Again, you're chasing ghosts. Before you said "how do you know that we aren't prone to getting stuck?" when I had never suggested we are not prone to getting stuck. Now you're saying can't "be taken as more than (currently) unprovable speculation." I agree! It is speculative. Where is this disconnect between what I'm saying and what you're responding to coming from?

_Microft 5y ago

Submitted a few times, discussed twice with a considerable number of comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 (2020; 115 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 (2018; 296 comments)

uniqueuid 5y ago

I always use the title of this wonderful essay to explain how "AI" works. Deep neural architectures are so performant (in part) because they make use of all these minuscule details which our brains shield us from seeing.

simion314 5y ago
Can you provide an example because I do not understand. Say some small detail that humans did not see because it was so small and our brain ignored it. For me ANN represent a more complex, giant function that we "interpolated" with tons of data , give same problem to some smart people and sometimes they will gtive you the exact solution with a proof.

bobthechef 5y ago

There is a tacit presupposition here that needs to be made explicit if we are not to betray it, namely, the distinction between properties and attributes. A property is something that follow from the essential nature of a thing. A mere attribute is something that isn't and could vary without contradicting the essential nature of a thing. So a property of triangles, following from Triangularity, is that its angles sum to 180 degrees. But the color of a triangle is an attribute that does not follow from its Triangularity. It may be important in some context, but it must be understood as secondary (of course, in a secondary way, you could say that it does tell us that the thing in question is capable of having that attribute, but the attribute itself is not the consequence of its essential nature). A specialist can suffer from the law of instrument for analogous reasons. If you put an immunologist in charge of policy, he may reduce the common good to merely those things with immediate and obvious immunological relevance to him. Sure, freedom from infection is important to the common good, but it isn't the only thing and indeed optimizing for that in excess incurs an enormous cost to the common good. Our education system, sadly, does not prepare us in foundational ways to reason and understand properly and this lack of intellectual and moral discipline can manifest in fixations (undisciplined passions, like in this case fear, can produce these fixations).

mauvehaus 5y ago

And if you think stairbuilding is complex, you should look into handrailing [0] The money quote from the article: "I’ve learned that the correct way to build a house is to design the handrail first, then design the stair, and the rest of the house will follow." Part of the reason you don't notice the complexity of everyday things is that humans have spent thousands of years perfecting the details and methods that let you take your stairs and handrails for granted. And, like, 90% of everything else. The McMaster-Carr catalog isn't >2" thick because they're trying to confuse you. It's that thick because everything they sell solves a different problem, that somebody worked out the details in years ago, and we live in a world where the experience and solutions embodied in every part gets mass produced and delivered the next day for the cost of mere money. And then there are manufactured handrail parts, which are a grotesque and simplified perversion of a properly carved handrail (discussed in the link). But at least regular people can afford a handrail for their stairs for safety too. [0] https://www.thisiscarpentry.com/2009/07/15/drawing-a-volute/ https://www.thisiscarpentry.com/2009/07/15/drawing-a-volute/

dsr_ 5y ago
The no-code people imagine that we are on the verge of living in a world where that catalog's equivalent in software is just a few months away. If they were right, it still wouldn't solve the problem analysis problem, but it would certainly help out the parts problem. It would also help move software into a professional engineering phase.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Well, they are going to be disapointed when they'll realize we haven't even figured out the catalog yet. Software is half a century old, we are still using flint to produce it. The only reason it looks fancy is because it makes more sparks, and a lot faster.
  - Verdex 5y ago
    We're just starting to get out of the alchemy stage right now. Wise men and magicians everywhere telling royalty that if they only pay them treasures that they will reveal the future and show them miracles. Meanwhile it turns out that NSS has a straight-forward vulnerability that everyone just somehow missed. If you look at the history of chemistry, mechanical engineering, or astronomy then you kind of get the impression that we're probably 150-300 years away from software development working the way everyone already imagines it working.

snowwrestler 5y ago

> I kept arguing because I thought I was right. I felt really annoyed with him and he was annoyed with me. In retrospect, I think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and I don’t think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and see if you can figure it out), he just heard ‘let’s draw some diagrams and compute the angle’ and didn’t think that was the solution, and if he had appreciated the thing that I saw I think he would have been more open to drawing some diagrams. But at the same time, he also understood that diagrams and math don’t account for the shape of the wood, which I did not appreciate. If we had been able to get these points across, we could have come to consensus. If you want to understand the value of “soft skills” like communication, it’s right here. Being able to understand that there are different points of view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost anyone. Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience.

an9n 5y ago
> Being able to understand that there are different points of view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost anyone. > Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and write critically about literature and art really starts with learning to detect and think carefully about different points of view: among characters, and between the artist and various members of their audience. This strikes me as highly ironic given the incredible narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses over recent years. Try seriously challenging the doctrine and one is liable to be cancelled, reprimanded, chucked off a course - even physically attacked.
- ok_dad 5y ago
  Please don't start flame-war topics on HN. This is way out of scope for the article. The GP was simply saying that when you study the humanities, you read a lot of different POVs, and those help you to understand that your way of thinking might not always be perfect, or the best, but that there are many angles to looking at a problem. Thanks! > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

I know a guy, just builds stairs. Every significant house builder in the area has him in, all the work he wants. Heard him say on the phone "I have so much work, If I don't want to do a job I don't have to do it. And I don't want to do that. Thanks!"

newsbinator 5y ago
Sounds like he's not charging enough
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I'm not sure the best equilibrium is "I can barely get enough work to fill my time". That's a very brittle position. Better to have some buffer and then you're able to turn away jobs you don't like. Maybe you leave 10% on the table, but if times get lean you don't want all of your prospects to dry up because "That guy charges way too much".
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    I'd say like with all freelancers and contractors, it's "I can't double my rates because then I'd lose half my business".
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Everyone has to find the sweet spot in their customer's price elasticity.

4monthsaway 5y ago

Aha that was different than I expected

teraflop 5y ago

The "colonizing the universe" diagram seems to be taken from this paper: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/space-races-settling.pdf https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/space-races-sett...

strict9 5y ago

This was a great read. Another way to appreciate the endless level of detail if you look hard enough is the Coastline Paradox[1], an idea expanded and articulated by Benoit Mandelbrot. Life has infinite levels of depth if you keep peeling back layers and look down a bit further. And when you think you know something, dig deeper and you realize you know less than you thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

adamrezich 5y ago
I have no formal education in physics or metaphysics or anything but it has long seemed obvious to me that reality is infinitely fractal in both the macro and micro. whenever a new particle or whatever is discovered, it seems like many people get excited that we're on the verge of understanding the elementary fundamental building blocks of reality or something, when I can't see any reason not to believe that reality will continue to be fractal infinitely when "zooming in." if one can accept this, then one can accept that any perceptions about reality he may have can only be at best a "useful model," and such models should be constantly updated in response to new data and observations. of course, this means that there is quite a bit of incentive in deliberately shaping the models people use to perceive reality...
- mersenne 5y ago
  If the universe is infinitely large (as we suspect it is), then it should also be infinitely small (even beyond our capacity to measure it). Otherwise, it's not really infinite.
  - avhon1 5y ago
    The matter of whether the universe is or isn't infinite is definitely not a settled matter. > Because we cannot observe space beyond the edge of the observable universe, it is unknown whether the size of the universe in its totality is finite or infinite. Estimates suggest that the whole universe, if finite, must be more than 250 times larger than the observable universe. Some disputed estimates for the total size of the universe, if finite, reach as high as 10^10^10^122 megaparsecs, as implied by a suggested resolution of the No-Boundary Proposal. [1] Secondly, rays (the geometric construct that have a point origin and extend infinitely in one direction) are infinitely long, but any point on them is finitely far away from the end. Why couldn't the universe be the same way -- unbounded in one direction (of scale), but bounded in the other? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size_and_regions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size_and_regions

jedimastert 5y ago

For some fun historical context, checkout Moxon's "Mechanick Exercises" or Nicholson's "Mechanic's Companion", which are both treatises on various tradecrafts (including carpentry and joinery, which is where stairs would come in) around the late 1600s and early 1800s, respectively. Those two books essentially serve as the foundation for the modern hand-tool woodworking movement. I mention this because "Lost Art Press" is currently on the front page, who are an independent woodworking book publisher near the front of this movement

an9n 5y ago

I thought about this the other day, thinking about how (some) people look down on other people and pat themselves on the back for being more knowledgable, better educated, more sophisticated, having better taste, being better bred (I'm from the UK lol) etc etc. But then there is always someone above one, looking down on one with the same arrogant prejudices. Who are these people that look down on me as an ignorant, blundering oaf, and what would I need to learn to fit in? Not that even if I did know what I was missing I would make the effort, heh.

bena 5y ago

Is it weird that I don't like his stairs? Also, I don't know many people that build wooden stairs with brackets. Usually, you get two pieces of suitably long and wide lumber, clamp them together, and cut them together. So it looks something like this (https://www.lowes.com/pd/Severe-Weather-4-Step-Pressure-Treated-Pine-Deck-Stair-Stringer/1000127671 https://www.lowes.com/pd/Severe-Weather-4-Step-Pressure-Trea...). This solves most of his problems. Basically, I get his point, but I think he chose a really poor example to illustrate it. All I'm hearing from this guy is: "I've never actually had to build stairs."

beervirus 5y ago
Cutting stringers instead of using brackets would implicate pretty much exactly the same set of details and problems.

javier10e6 5y ago

To make matters worst, what you see with your open eyes, is not one image, is a collection of images with all kind of distortions, blur and other smudges that your brain "photoshop" away to produce an image that conforms to the flawed/bias criteria that your brains considers to be a good image. The same happens with your ears and your taste buds. Reality in our brains is pure poetry.

kordlessagain 5y ago

If you want to know how much reality gots, build a house by yourself.

f154hfds 5y ago

I recently had to build some stringers for a deck. We had an original CAD with 11 steps (for a total of 12 including the top). When we produced the layout somehow we ended up laying out 10 steps instead of 11 because I wanted a specific tread depth (~10 inches). I figured why would one fewer step matter for anything structural? Well it turns out that 10% extra cut into my 2x12 left about an inch less in the beam of wood which was enough for a 12' span to bounce as you walk up and down! I have learned that a universal unavoidable element to any model is that it oversimplifies the thing it is trying to explain. Sometimes that is OK and using the model we gain useful insight into a system. Other times the simplification of the model ruins its explanatory power. Academics can sometimes forget this I think in their eagerness to understand and explain things. Some models that have varying degrees of usefulness are the following: Newton's F=ma, supply and demand economics, Marxism vs capitalism, colonialism, post modernism, globalism vs nationalism, conservatism vs liberalism. We have to be very careful applying an overly simplistic model to complex phenomena. Sometimes our desire to understand something at a high level erodes our ability to understand it at all, especially when modeling human behavior where interactions fundamentally occur at the level of the individual. Colonialism in my mind is a good example of this. We have a model (a simplification of reality) that says this is a specific time period in human history in which people groups migrated between areas trampling on indigenous cultures in the process. The reality is that this has happened since the dawn of civilization and will continue, that some colonists at some times respected the native peoples and the movement was mutually beneficial. I believe colonialism as a model has limited usefulness and it's much more useful to look at specific movements of peoples and what happened as a result.

agustif 5y ago

On stairs, I remember watching about this one on Ancient Aliens or something like that, lol https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/mysterious-helix-staircase-loretto-chapel-001295 https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...

setgree 5y ago

This is now the 12th time this has been posted on HN [0], and I see why, it is very insightful. But his other post, 'submission and dominance among friends,' had more impact on me. Connecting our behavior to our mammal relatives like he does is not exactly novel, but combined with his frankness about his own needs -- especially the profoundly uncool desire to be "on the submissive end of this kind of clear status play" -- the piece was revelatory for me. Perhaps you'll enjoy: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-among-friends http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org

BWStearns 5y ago

Kind of a weird tangent but can anyone elaborate on this quote: "trap a drop of water between two other liquids and heat it, you can raise the temperature to at least 300 °C with nothing happening" I knew you could change boiling point with pressure but is this suggesting that doing something like having a layer of oil on top of an ambient pressure pot of water would prevent boiling? I tried googling for some elaboration but only found discussions of superheating water via pressure changes.

garof 5y ago
I'm not sure of the experiment that this might be referring to, but it sounds like superheating[0]. Trapping the drop of water between two other liquids could be some version of a "clean container, free of nucleation sites" as described in the first paragraph of the wikipedia article. Other ideas? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating

N1H1L 5y ago

In fact this is why self-driving cars are so hard! A complete newbie driver faces all of these tiny issues, which they learn to forget as they become practiced. There are so many subtleties in these scenarios, that it's mind boggling.

yoyar 5y ago

No single person understands everything about how a pencil is made.

ilyagr 5y ago
In case somebody doesn't know the reference: https://mises.org/library/i-pencil https://mises.org/library/i-pencil

Animats 5y ago

Making stuff to specified dimensions has a well understood workflow. Order of operations matters. That problem dominates machining. It's a big deal for carpentry, too. It's not hard. Most people figure it out before the second time they build something. (Although making anything stay at specified dimensions from Home Depot "fresh from the tree" lumber is difficult. That is why kiln-dried lumber exists.) Wooden boat tension joinery - now that's hard. You need the results of several centuries of puzzle-solving and dealing with the effects of water to do that well. There was some article a few years back on HN about two incompetents trying to build a cabin in the woods, with too little experience, too little planning, and too much drinking. Their worst mistake is that they didn't know that you build roof trusses at ground level. (Or just buy them prebuilt.) Then hoist completed trusses into place. They were trying to stick-build roof trusses up in the air at roof level. That did not end well. This stuff isn't rocket science. There are books easily available, and lots of people who've done it before.

conover 5y ago
You are thinking of this article, which was a good read: https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/friends-diy-cabin-build-washington/ https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/friends...

ineedasername 5y ago

Not quite anything to do with reality. More just about how seemingly simple things (stairs) actually are more complicated. That isn't much of a revelation? Although it seems like plenty of startups looking to disrupt something run headlong into the issue. Anyway, I think a more proper title is something like "Everything is More Complicated That it Looks"