3 ms·
When I first read this, my intial reaction was "LOL what a silly... of course the simple reason is..." ... and then it turns out, I couldn't actually explain it
by SkittyDog 5y ago
When I first read this, my intial reaction was "LOL what a silly... of course the simple reason is..." ... and then it turns out, I couldn't actually explain it to myself. I had a couple of reasons lined up, but none of them passed muster when I broke it down.
I suspect the real reason my be overlapping domains of varying precision/accuracy, which tolerate different degrees of error on any specific time measurement, but still need to agree on a shared center of the distribution of that error.
So in our daily lives, we might tolerate a fraction of a second of drift without notice... But there are some specialty domains that do require more precision, and we need the time measurements in both domains to mostly line up, to avoid confusion. So our daily clock needs to be slaved to the more precise clock, even if we don't require that precision in most things.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoIt's not obvious to me that there would be a loss of precision. If you are a farmer, you check the solar calendar and plan activities based on that. For your daily work, you still have the normal 24hour day. But we do all sort of dumb time related things: - day light savings - leap seconds, days, years Some places too close to the poles don't have normal day/night cycles of light. So we already tolerate a lot of weird time stuff. This way we keep tolerating it and get rid of the calculations.
- SkittyDog 5y agoWait... Why is all that timekeeping stuff "dumb"? Because you don't see a reason for it, and you can't imagine that you might not yet know the reason why? That's just plain egotistical, man. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence You need to learn the actual reasons why precision synchronous time exists. Until you do that, you're just wandering around in the dark, being silly.