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Stolen from previous discussion https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox The gif of Great Britain looks like i

• hnfong 3y ago
  I thought about fractals while reading the article too. And I'm starting to worry that maybe fractal-like concepts not only apply to geometry (as in, "how long is the coastline", or "what direction is the coastline at point (x,y)?"), but to truths in general. Just like the article describes, "rough" facts like "water boils at 100C" can have tonnes of nuance, and when you drill down into the details, you might discover that the truth is so much more complicated that the notion of truth and falsity is lost among the vast sea of complex details. (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram#/media/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram#/media/File:Phas... ... who'd have thought something taught in elementary school would be so complicated :-/ ) So is it possible that most "truths" in which we have absolute conviction are actually just rough understandings, and if we dig deep enough we'd find that we're actually mostly wrong? It seems insane to think that way, but I have a strong intuition that this might actually be the case.