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> It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from
by travisjungroth 3y ago
> It’s so incredible how deep the rabbit-hole goes when you try to solve a real world problem and you have the capacity to understand and pull information from a vast number of seemingly unrelated works.
It's funny, I considered quoting this other part as well:
> The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside.
The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Because I get that discovering a new subfield of topology is different from discovering the new sounds you can make banging on your stove. But it's not just that one has more to it than the other.
Real world problems with disparate fields involved are a rich of source of "medium sized" fractal buds by this unnamed measure. No one is dedicating their life to your application of measure theory to data dashboards, but it's meatier than searching in the absurd and easier to find than breaking ground in pure theory.
- mistermann 3y ago> The nature of fractals is that everything is a new fractal bud. There's really endless complexity everywhere. So I don't think that alone is the "big prize". There's some other dimension, like utility or interest. Here's another dimension: try convincing others of this while they're discussing a specific object level problem and see how that goes.
- travisjungroth 3y agoI don't really follow. You've quoted a few statements and I also don't know what you mean by a specific object level problem. Is it that it would be hard to convince people there's endless complexity in this domain while they're deciding what to get for lunch? Yeah, probably. They're too hungry.
- mistermann 3y agoThere are certain complexities that only seem (currently) accessible from an abstract state of mind. For example, people (including right here on HN) will often enthusiastically agree that they are subjective to various cognitive flaws when discussing a psychology paper on the subject, but this fact typically cannot be realized or even considered when discussing specific political matters. Ironically, genuine intelligence and knowledge often seems to make the problem even worse. And of course, all of this theory is subject to the theory itself!
- travisjungroth 3y agooh gosh I understand now and totally agree. I want to wire up an LLM to read a doc and just point out all of these sorts of flaws. If you haven't read this (not LLM related), I highly recommend it: https://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.pdf https://statweb.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/thinking.p...