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Quoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple." That sounds a very str
by vladms 9mo ago
Quoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple."
That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.
If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.
- jklinger410 9mo ago> Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect. I find the complication comes from poor definitions, poor understanding of those definitions, and pedantic arguments. Less about the facts of reality being complicated and more about our ability to communicate it to each other.
- apercu 9mo agoI’ve noticed the inverse as in the more I understand something, the less “simple” it looks. Apparent simplicity usually comes from weak definitions and overconfident summaries, not from the underlying system being easy. Complexity is often there from the start, we just don’t see it yet.
- jklinger410 9mo agoI suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. Simplicity comes from strong definitions, and "infinite" complexity comes from weak ones. If you're always chasing the next technicality then maybe you didn't really know what question you were looking to answer at the onset.
- balamatom 9mo agoIMO both perspectives have their place. Sometimes what's missing is the information, sometimes what's lacking is the ability to communicate it and/or the willingness to understand it. So in different circumstances either viewpoint may be appropriate. What's missing more often than not, across fields of study as well as levels of education, is the overall commitment to conceputal integrity. From this we observe people's habitual inability or unwillingness to be definite about what their words mean - and their consequent fear of abstraction. If one is in the habit of using one's set of concepts in the manner of bludgeons, one will find many ways and many reasons to bludgeon another with them - such as if a person turned out to be using concepts as something more akin to clockwork.
- jklinger410 9mo agoYes, we're in complete agreement about conceptual integrity. Reality is such that, without integrity, you can prove almost anything you want. As long as your bar for "prove" is at the very bottom.
- pixl97 9mo ago>If you're always chasing the next technicality This sounds like someone who has never studied physics. "Oh wow, I figured out everything about physics... except this one little weird thing here" [A lifetime of chasing why that one little weird thing occurs] "I know nothing about physics, I am but a mote in an endless void" --- Strong or weak definitions don't save you here, what you are looking for is error bars and acceptable ranges.
- jklinger410 9mo agoYour response along with others is proving my point in an unfortunate way. If you think I'm saying that the world is not infinitely complex, you are missing the point.
- nathan_compton 9mo agoThis is actually insightful: we usually don't know the question we are trying to answer. The idea that you can "just" find the right question is naive.
- breuleux 9mo ago> Simplicity comes from strong definitions Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable. You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.
- WJW 9mo agoSimple counterexample: chess. The rules are simple enough we regularly teach them to young children. There's basically no randomness involved. And yet, the rules taken together form a game complex enough that no human alive can fully comprehend their consequences.
- somenameforme 9mo agoThere's a great analog with this in chess as well. ~1200 - omg chess is so amazing and hard. this is great. ~1500 - i'm really starting to get it! i can beat most people i know easily. i love studying this complex game! ~1800 - this game really isn't that hard. i can beat most people at the club without trying. really I think the only thing separating me from Kasparov is just a lot of opening prep and study ~2300 - omg this game is so friggin hard. 2600s are on an entirely different plane, let alone a Kasparov or a Carlsen. Magnus Carlsen - "Wow, I really have no understanding of chess." - Said without irony after playing some game and going over it with a computer on stream. A fairly frequent happening.
- ric2b 9mo agoFunny how the start of your scale, 1200 Elo, is essentially what I have as a goal and am not even close yet, lol.
- StopDisinfo910 9mo agoI think it's more of a curve from my point of view. Beginner: I know nothing and this topic seems impossible to grasp. Advanced beginner: I get it now. It's pretty simple. Intermedite: Hmm, this thing is actually very complicated. Expert: It's not that complicated. I can explain a simple core covering 80% of it. The other 20% is an ocean of complexity.
- empressplay 9mo agoWisdom comes from knowing what you don't know.
- nathan_compton 9mo agoHaha.
- evan_a_a 9mo agoThis is a literary device. The article continues to explain why this isn’t a simple problem, and it’s clear from the conclusion that the author understands the complexity. >But it’s good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which raw numbers—like population counts, but also many others—are only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual construction of these numbers is important, because it encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility about the world: we really know much less than we think.
- anal_reactor 9mo agoI guess this is why reading things other than technical documentation remains important.
- quietbritishjim 9mo agoOr it's a reason why literary devices should only be employed when they aren't distractingly wrong.
- rustystump 9mo agoI guess dune should be totally different given how distractingly wrong it is…
- tjwebbnorfolk 9mo agoor to not jump to conclusions from reading a single sentence of a multi page article
- vladms 9mo agoI tried to check a list of literary devices (Wikipedia) and couldn't exactly map to a specific category - would be interesting to know if there such a category. The problem I have with this literary device is that I think it works if most / many questions would fit it then he would go to disapprove it. Using it, for me, kind of indirectly reinforces the idea that "there are many simple answers". Which I came to loathe as it is pushed again and again due to social media. Everything is "clear", "simple", "everybody knows better", "everybody did their research". How did this literal device make you feel? Interested? Curious? Bored? When I read it my initial instinct was "no, it's definitely not simple, so if that's what are you going to explain me, I will not bother".
- leesec 9mo ago"It shouldn’t be new to anyone that population data in the poor world is bad" from the same author and same article. but cherry pick away if it makes you feel intelligent.
- adamrezich 9mo agoMost people believe that most things are knowable, and happily defer to published statistics whenever possible.
- AniseAbyss 9mo ago[dead]
- bjourne 9mo agoNitpickinging is a quaint obsession.
- veunes 9mo agoNot simple in the sense of easy, but simple in the sense of foundational: if a government can't even roughly say how many people it governs, everything built on top of that gets shaky