Reality is not meaningfully redundant at the data level but the computation is nonetheless compressible because the dynamic feature space is vastly smaller than

Reality is not meaningfully redundant at the data level but the computation is nonetheless compressible because the dynamic feature space is vastly smaller than the data. The macro characteristics of entity dynamics in the world is that of a sparse metastable graph. There is considerable compression possible at the computational level, since most entities in the world are fungible in every discernible aspect, but the data model is not similarly reducible because what can be compressed away is context dependent. Since the computation is less tractable part, this makes the modeling problem eminently viable albeit still extraordinarily difficult. To model the effects of the relatively small number of nodes and entities that can shift the equilibrium you need to compute over the true graph, not some aggregate and summarized roll-up of the graph. There is a real tension between anonymization/privacy (and reducing computational costs) and the ability to build models of human systems that remotely reflect real-world dynamics. Models based on anonymized aggregations are notoriously rubbish when ground-truthed. It is also important to treat these models as sparse metastable graphs. I am always slightly horrified by the number of serious academic disciplines that often default to modeling human systems as if they were a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problem. Global human systems don’t have CFD-like structure but CFD is attractive because it is easy to reason about computationally and widely understood. A lot of scientific research on models of human dynamics (e.g. epidemiology) that were ultimately debunked had a root error in the use of CFD-like assumptions about how humans interact and behave. It is technically possible to build a far higher fidelity model of physical world dynamics than I think most people would expect or intuit. Unfortunately, that is not the hardest part of making it useful.