I'm personally convinced that a lot of arguments in modern life boil down to not going to a sufficient level of detail. Mostly I find that both parties in an disagreement have valid points and simply haven't defined their terms precisely enough or been clear that they are talking about a p95 vs a p5 situation.
I agree, most of the time you need to refine and quantify the question.
People are resistant to that though. If I'm being generous I think they think it's just saving time, because they 'know' the right answer. But the melancholy cynic in me wonders if it is just ego.
I don't think it's cynicism to realize that people are imperfect creatures subject to the whims of insecurity and ego, not being well slept, yadda yada. To me that's just realism.
it can be hard for me to admit that my entrenched beliefs may be flawed but enhanced with an updated worldview…now me thinks this is my ego…actually i am now sure of it…a detail i had not previously flushed out…
Agreed. A lot of the past conflict in my life boils down to this as well.
Conversely, I'm now in the habit of asking big "obvious" or "dumb" questions; questions that will highlight assumptions being made by each party. I'll often go slow at first to establish that these large unspoken thoughts are aligned and then work my way down to lower levels of detail until we hit an actual disagreement, rather than a mere misunderstanding.
It drives me crazy to spend 30 minutes arguing with someone only to find that "Wait, you're talking about THAT? I thought we were talking about THIS."
It's too common for people to find themselves arguing in the direction of the same general concept, but differences in their understanding/interpretation will diverge more and more the farther you get into the discussion. It's so helpful to lay out terms at the start when possible.
Agreed - and this is why I find it _so_ frustrating when I try to take a step back (or down, or whichever direction seems most intuitive to you) and actually define terms, only to get met with a "you're just nitpicking about terminology, I'm trying to communicate ideas!"
If we aren't using the same terminology, we can't possibly communicate ideas.
Absolutely. I summarise it as "abstraction is the curse of the age".
My wife works in governance, and when a proposed new policy is being discussed, she is always the one to say "so, how would the policy work in this situation, with these people involved? [Outlines a situation.] Tell me the steps."
And, of course, the elegant, abstract policy is shown to be unworkable or lead to manifestly unfair or absurd outcomes.
I usually phrase it as arguing parties discussing a high-dimensional idea by projecting it down to a much lower dimensional space, and if they can't seem to agree, it means they're projecting to widely different bases - considering different aspects.
Visual analogy: take a cylinder floating in the middle of the room, and a single light source you move around. As you move the light around, it'll cast shadows of very different shapes. This is merely projecting a 3D object to 2D, but if all anyone in the argument has is a single snapshot of a shadow, you could see how a person seeing a circle might have trouble agreeing with a person seeing a rectangle - and yet they're still talking about the same thing.
(The biggest hurdle is to get people to realize their view on a topic is a low-dimensional projection of a high-dimensional thing, and not just the thing - and that to do something productive with it, one must be willing to "walk around" a bit, project to different bases.)
This was a beautiful read until I got to the part about disagreements. I think it may distract from the main message about the complexity of tasks and the value of experience.
Also related to the ending, I‘ve come to realise more and more that most people reason out of belief first and arguments second on a lot of things (maybe most things?) Climate change deniers are an obvious example. But also more nuanced views such as "the software I make makes the world a better place" (I belief this myself), "me being a healthcare worker is a great thing for humanity", or "I need to game at least once a week to relax." And it makes sense. Many things are extremely complex and so picking one side and going for that will make sense in many cases. It’s often necessary to be able to make decisions. However, the risk is getting too stuck in certain ideas. It’s easier to accept a long held belief and reject opposing information than to re-evaluate.
Professional deniers are propagandists, not good-faith debaters. Lack of nuance is one problem, but there's a far bigger problem with groups of people knowingly trying to poison and undermine anything that resembles reality-based consensus.
Absolutely - PR firms, lobbyists, astroturfers, troll farms - I'm in full agreement, and there's a lot of them around.
Also a problem are those who label the undecided or free thinking among us as not being good faith actors. And unfortunately it's a tough position to be in, as you get attacked from all sides for not choosing a side.
I think it's because we create a story about every part of us and our life. Every thing we do (sometimes we even do it after the fact).
I feel like those beliefs are what's keeping us grounded in the sense of understanding the world, of being in control. so it makes sense that we would start with them even if we are not aware of it.
And it makes sense that it's hard to let them go because without them you get a sense that you are just floating away and don't have any to "hang" your assumptions on.
You can reason a lot but there comes a point when things get bigger than you and you have to trust some other authority or just trust your gut.
There's not many people that could comfortably reason from first principles and be satisfied with where they end up. (I don't think I could do that)
Actually correct take: You cannot slow down climate change without mass depopulation, and most climate change alarmism is overhyped. It will impose a cost to civilization and it will have to be dealt with by adapting to it, rather than some inane scheme to create carbon tax credits to justify more ways for the hyper-wealthy to stay wealthy.
> I‘ve come to realise more and more that most people reason out of belief first and arguments second on a lot of things (maybe most things?) Climate change deniers are an obvious example
Do you think most climate change believers reasoned themselves into that position? I think for >95% of people, belief in climate change is a purely social phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of people don't understand enough about physical phenomena like blackbody radiation to have any intelligent opinion about climate change one way or the other.
I do not think that. This similarly applies to both sides of some other contentious scientific/medical topics which can easily get someone labeled an “antivaxxer” as an ad-hominem directed without solid reasoning. One imagines what labels were given to those who did not support widespread leech therapy at its peak…
The untrue explanations are often the simpler ones. They are easier for people to "understand" even if they are wrong. And people don't like to be perceived as dumb, therefore they keep on arguing that they are right.
Example: Flat Earth. The horizon looks flat, therefore the Earth must be flat.
> Also related to the ending, I‘ve come to realise more and more that most people reason out of belief first and arguments second on a lot of things (maybe most things?)
This is the thesis to the introduction to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Boiling it down, he argues that self-justification is the most fundamental human reaction. We reason after, not before, and our reasoning flows to align with our own justification.
I agree that looking at the details really helps when reasoning about things. But that is hard as it is always easier to look at things from 10,000 feet
The interesting thing is that we somehow manage to cope with all this complexity, both as individuals, and as a society, and survive. When you look at all the details, and all the things that can go wrong, it looks like maybe it wouldn't be possible.
Also at a natural (non-man made) level, the complexity of biochemistry and the need to get 30 trillion or so cells working together as a single animal, in the presence of another 30 trillion or so single-celled organisms of random species, doesn't really seem like something that's going to succeed.
> cope with all this complexity, both as individuals, and as a society, and survive.
Surviving is not thriving. Like roman construction, we just have very big error margings and margin of safety. Things do not have to work perfectly to finction
> to get 30 trillion or so cells working together as a single animal
It's no coincidence then that your brain has a circuit to create backwards explanations for behavior that you didn't initiate, it helps create the illusion that you are a single animal, when in practice, you mostly aren't.
> In retrospect, I think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and I don’t think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and see if you can figure it out)
The biggest problem I see is that the part of the board you need to cut off intersects the ground. If you're leaning the board on the ground, you need to somehow trace a line parallel to the ground several inches above it. Hopefully you can solve that by using a spare chunk of 2x6 and tracing along that. Similar story for the vertical joint.
I don't know if that's what the author meant, though.
Interestingly, as crude as the diagram is, you can feed it to ChatGPT's data analysis plugin and it will not only recognize what's depicted, but offer to calculate the cut angles for the 2x12s given the rise and run. I was pretty impressed that it recognized the problem without any prompting other than the image itself.
Adding to the previous discussions on counter-steering bicycles: you can see it in tyre tracks. e.g. ride through a puddle; or, ride from rain to under cover.
Consider: how do you steer riding no-hands? Shifting your body weight makes the front wheel turn (because of the "rake"), but now your bodyweight is on the outer side of the turn! Hold it for a (brief!) moment, then lean the bicycle the other way and you have a nice turn in the opposite direction - which is what you wanted all along.
This is a critical skill on motorcycles, and most people learn it subconsciously, but real masters can throw the bike into turns in ways that make no sense unless you take countersteering into account. I'd love to be good enough someday to make physics seem confusing...
As a cyclist and motorcyclist, I've always found that bicycles will let you get away with not knowing you're countersteering, but on motorcycles you really need to be explicit about "push harder to turn tighter".
No matter how closely you look, there is always more to it. However you think things are, good or bad, you are "wrong". But you may have sufficient precision to make some specific technique operate. (The technique is predicated on an implicit theory simplifying how things are. Both the technique and theory are "wrong".)
In finding correlations between two things, a tricky bit is finding which two things (a thing can be an arbitrary composites of other things). When we do find a correlation, that becomes how we see it, and we think in terms of this particular simplifying theory of reality.
i.e. there are two issues: (1) reality is complex. (2) we simplify it.
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: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.
I think the main message is this here: "If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.".
I've done programming and construction and more than often construction is like programming, especially when you are renovating.
This is non-intuitive to me because programming languages (above the level of assembly, probably) are made by humans to represent human concepts, while construction is based on physics.
While writing that sentence I realized that programming does have a lot to do with logic, which is a construct of reality, and not humanity. So I guess it does makes sense that programming would be fiddly.
Programming languages can theoretically abstract things away to the extent a properly formulated phrase will get working code from an LLM. Construction designs and materials are still concretely limited by what physics will allow.
Well, programming languages are limited by what logic will allow, and computers (and by extension programming languages and LLMs) are also limited by what physics will allow.
Human choices are, yeah. My comments on this thread ultimately derive from an intro to programming with Java course 10+ years ago that I got a B- in because I never submitted the final project worth 20% of the grade. I bit off way more than I could chew in the design of the project, but ultimately gave up because of a human design choice called "type erasure" that my limited programming skills couldn't work around.
I've always kind of seen programming above the level of electrical engineering as working in a social system designed with decisions that seemed like a good idea to a person who isn't me. This point was driven home a year ago when taking an R course and reading the literature discussing the grammar of R.
But yeah, in addition there are physical limits for programming as well. That's what just came as a mild insight for me here. I theoretically had been aware of it, but as an end-user / non-programmer just hadn't really put it together and thought about it before.
You keep using programming languages instead of programming as an analogy. Is that thought through or do you just throw these two concepts in the same basket?
But it's thought through as a person who is an amateur at best. I've taken literal introductory courses to programming in Fortran, Java, and R, have hacked together two or three VBscript programs, had a very slight one-day introduction to assembler in the Java course, and as a child was briefly in a summer program that had us "programming" a very simple robot (telling it to go certain lengths in certain directions). A former roommate said my pseudocode (when taking the Fortran course) looked like Pascal, and I used to watch him do some Forth programming.
So in terms of programming philosophy I am really, really clueless. But in terms of programming languages what I do have is a basic understanding of how incredibly diverse the languages are. And that a huge amount of this diversity is based on human preferences.
As an analogy to construction. Yes, there are a diverse number of techniques that can be used in constructions (yurts, hay-bail housing, etcetera). One could also draw an analogy to pre-fab construction as modular programming and libraries as kits (or whatever). But for the most part, outside of scale, it seems that most construction effectively standardized on a few "languages", if not a single language.
One thing your initial reasoning left out is that human concepts are not simple, either. Money may seem simple until you start to consider currencies, rounding, taxes, fees, etc. Text may seem simple until you consider punctuation, different alphabets, math symbols, emoji, and other special symbols, glyphs, or characters. Names may seem simple until you consider suffixes, names that consist of multiple words, middle names, cultures that place the family name first, nicknames, name changes, various accents and other "special" characters (that probably are perfectly normal to the person with the name), etc. As a programmer you often have to deal with other programmers' solutions to handle all this complexity, which may be flawed or simply different.
I mention all this not to pick holes in your logic but because it sounded like you were trying to look more closely at your intuition.
> As a programmer you often have to deal with other programmers' solutions to handle all this complexity
That's entirely my point. Human concepts can be incredibly complicated, or just as bad based on ideas that are foreign to others. Some people like figuring out human complexity, but no one likes figuring out everyone's personal complexity.
Many disciplines are still more constrained by our limited understanding of, and ability to manipulate, physical constraints. The more abstract programming languages become, the more personally complex they become. Like money and verbal languages.
I think this distinction is artificial. Programming is made of and constrained by physics: the electric field in the transistors is a real physical phenomenon. While constructions are made of concepts; just ask an architect about "negative space".
Only if you don't do new things often outside of programming. Everything certainly is fiddly and anything new you do is going be technical if you care about doing it well. I spent half a day last week learning to paint-fill engraving to make labeling. Conceptually it was trivial (coat with paint, wipe off excess, sand back when dry) but there was still plenty of nuance.
I enjoyed the stair story here quite a bit - I find that I always have a newfound appreciation for the “real” jobs when I find a fine craftsman at work.
We had a curved staircase fabricated for our house and it was absolutely fascinating to watch the planning and execution go into this task. The original measurements were plugged into a cad drawing where we could adjust the number of treads and the position of the top and bottom steps based on our preference. Then they fabricated the entire assembly offsite and brought it in via crane in one piece. Even building the handrail was fascinating as there was a jig built in place to bend the wood to the curve required.
The physical constraints and fractal complexity is fascinating for someone like me who is used to deterministic machines moving bits on a daily basis.
Aside: Building stairs that way is a really bad idea. Don't use angle brackets – you cut stringers. And besides the first and last step, stringers are pretty straightforward to layout with a carpenter's square with some stair guides (two little posts that screw to the square). And, generally you just layout 8" rise, 12" deep stairs, so you really don't lay out anything at all.
But, really, don't build stairs like OP suggested.
Somehow as easy as it is conceptually, I still find cutting 3 stringers that line up well to be surprisingly difficult. In part because I’ve only has to do it a handful of times in my life.
pretty amazing how the simplest of solutions seems to be so elusive. i've been guilty on more than one occassion of making something seemingly simple as difficult as wrangling cats.
It's just experience. Everything you've done before or that you've seen done by people that knew what they were doing is trivial, everything you haven't done before is difficult.
Yup. If you're doing almost anything in wood, a set of clamps is more useful than you'd think.
I made a table. The legs are all exactly the same length, but don't ask me what that exact length is - I eyeballed the height I wanted and then clamped all the legs together before cutting them.
Another tip for building things with legs - a 3-legged object is stable on any uneven surface while a 4-legged objects will wobble on uneven surfaces.
This is because 3 points make a plane, adding a 4th point that is not on that plane introduces a wobble.
Easiest way to avoid that wobble: get the legs to within 1 mm, add felt pad to the bottom of the legs. The pressure of the table will compress the felt and all four legs now contact the ground.
> Easiest way to avoid that wobble: get the legs to within 1 mm, add felt pad to the bottom of the legs. The pressure of the table will compress the felt and all four legs now contact the ground.
On a level floor, sure. But for something that will be on uneven surfaces, like outside, 3 legs are stable, even if the legs are all different sizes[1].
[1] Three points make a plane, the plane itself may not be level, but because all points of contact are on the same plane there is no wobble. When there are more than 3 legs, some points may not be on the same plane, producing a wobble.
I also don't like that fixtures at top and bottom are SPOF. Why not add pillars to the top and ~3rd from bottom steps, then tie with another beam, like an H overlapping a ladder?
That way, there will be far less chances that bolts spontaneously rip off and stairs go down, nor the lengths of pillars to have to be critical dimensions. The pillars can optionally be cut to precise lengths to be screwed through both steps and slopes for maximum Apple-ness, or, can be lazily cut to long-enough lengths, nailed through to steps from the "outside", and used as base for handrails as if it had been the plan.
(dc: not an engineering advise. consult a real engineer for safety. Also add cross beams in width-height plane, they help tremendously)
Yeah, having the steps only connected by some small screw brackets is borderline redneck engineering, someone's gonna get killed when two screws come loose.
I blame this phenomenon for why people feel mathematics is not useful. It is, it's just that reality is more complex than high school mathematics can properly prepare you for. To understand the mathematical solution, should you encounter it, does however require some foundational knowledge so if you don't know any then you can't even begin to understand it (possibly even failing to identify it is mathematical).
I mean take something practical like a mortgage. It's fairly easy to calculate the annuities using a geometric series, but that places it beyond most people's mathematical skills. Sure you could use a special calculator, or if you're adventurous look up the formula (beware though, Wikipedia is bound to lead to errors by defining the monthly rate as yearly rate / 12), and then it probably may not like doing mathematics at all but neither do you really understand what's happening.
Then you can start layering on the complexity by estimating repayments based on the expected variability of future interest rates, convert to Real Dollars based on inflation and expected wage growth, then compare with alternative options such as renting + investing, etc...
It's astounding how some of math's first practical applications is to calculate movement of the stars. Absence of frictions and close bodies make physics much easier to approximate than anything on earth. Maybe to have students appreciate math, we should have them predict eclipse one again. God create astronomy to teach humans mathematics.
I dunno. It seems to me like high school math is a pretty decent foundation for understanding many important aspects of the world (derivatives, integrals, etc.).
And I think that one can clearly and substantively “get” and intuitively understand and intelligently work with an amortizing loan without needing to understand whatever level of math is required to comprehend why pressing (g) (12i) on an HP 12c is not an atomically precise representation of of the answer out to the 12th decimal place.
My mortgage company charges interest based on the number of days in the month divided by 365. I have replicated their calculation like this. I'm not sure what they do in leap years - there are at least 3 distinct approaches.
Yet you will find that mortage interests charged by the bank don't match your series, because they use an accrual schedule with a special way to measure years fractions, then calculate an equivalent notional for those dates, and remap that to your payment calendar.
Turns out there is a surprinsing amount of details here as well. And you don't have all parameters for the calculation, like often in life.
It's not necessarily wrong, but it's missing any disclaimer about which interest rates they're talking about so if you don't know what you're doing it will lead to mistakes.
You are correct about the mortgage payments, I had a 1-2 cent error every few months, after a days struggle, I simply added a “Penny” column to add or subtract as necessary so that they would match!
"The first problem you’ll encounter is that cutting your 2x12s to the right angle is a bit complicated because there’s no obvious way to trace the correct angles."
Rubbish or as we say here: bollocks. Chippies have been doing first fit for centuries.
Its lovely that someone is discovering how wood and homes work. All power to you. Tomorrow - bricks?
Feel all depends how one looks at things. For example, the vacuum, supposedly there should be nothing there. However, uncertainty principle allows fluctuations of all kinds which are not physically directly observable. If one looks at things at the level of principle, it is simple. However, if one tries to look into the actual fluctuations, there is infinite and unknown amount of complexity.
To me, it's not so much that reality has a surprising amount of detail, it's that our brains make us feel like whatever model we have is complete. Same thing, of course, but focusing on the brain gets us closer to the cause.
I have this comic on my wall at my desk.[1] It's about how much work goes into every detail of the everyday things we take for granted. I practice law, mostly patent litigation, and often my job entails untangling one of these stories.
Seeing this here again, I was wondering if it's related to current events. I hope it isn't too soon, sorry to bother you in that case.
Can't you see? Let me explain.
The point of the post is that when you try to translate ideas to the physical world, there are plenty of quirks and you quickly find out what's the difference between theory and practice. That's why many people think that the chatting performance of an AI isn't a good measure of its ability to conquest the world.
And that's why some are so fed up with the doom prophecies, they seem disconnected from reality. But I believe the general opinion has swung too much in the other direction and maybe, just maybe, it's not wise to completely stop thinking about safety.
This was a brilliant read for me back in the day (still is!) and gave me the inspiration to write a post[0] about detail abstraction, market forces and why you can't fit big cups in coffee machines.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 92.4 ms ] threadI need a CI/CD pipeline to deploy it.
I should use a static code analysis tool.
I need an observability tool!
Let's to security code reviews.
Do I have a SBOM?
Which MFA should I use?
Should I put it inside a container or go serverless?
Better generate a OpenAPI spec!
Do I have enough tests?
Oh, I need blue/green deployments!
Should I deploy to the edge?
People are resistant to that though. If I'm being generous I think they think it's just saving time, because they 'know' the right answer. But the melancholy cynic in me wonders if it is just ego.
Conversely, I'm now in the habit of asking big "obvious" or "dumb" questions; questions that will highlight assumptions being made by each party. I'll often go slow at first to establish that these large unspoken thoughts are aligned and then work my way down to lower levels of detail until we hit an actual disagreement, rather than a mere misunderstanding.
It drives me crazy to spend 30 minutes arguing with someone only to find that "Wait, you're talking about THAT? I thought we were talking about THIS."
It's too common for people to find themselves arguing in the direction of the same general concept, but differences in their understanding/interpretation will diverge more and more the farther you get into the discussion. It's so helpful to lay out terms at the start when possible.
If we aren't using the same terminology, we can't possibly communicate ideas.
My wife works in governance, and when a proposed new policy is being discussed, she is always the one to say "so, how would the policy work in this situation, with these people involved? [Outlines a situation.] Tell me the steps."
And, of course, the elegant, abstract policy is shown to be unworkable or lead to manifestly unfair or absurd outcomes.
I admire my wife's patience greatly.
Visual analogy: take a cylinder floating in the middle of the room, and a single light source you move around. As you move the light around, it'll cast shadows of very different shapes. This is merely projecting a 3D object to 2D, but if all anyone in the argument has is a single snapshot of a shadow, you could see how a person seeing a circle might have trouble agreeing with a person seeing a rectangle - and yet they're still talking about the same thing.
(The biggest hurdle is to get people to realize their view on a topic is a low-dimensional projection of a high-dimensional thing, and not just the thing - and that to do something productive with it, one must be willing to "walk around" a bit, project to different bases.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304840 - Nov 2023 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597 - June 2023 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 2021 (118 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006256 - July 2021 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 2020 (115 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 2018 (294 comments)
Also a problem are those who label the undecided or free thinking among us as not being good faith actors. And unfortunately it's a tough position to be in, as you get attacked from all sides for not choosing a side.
I think it's because we create a story about every part of us and our life. Every thing we do (sometimes we even do it after the fact).
I feel like those beliefs are what's keeping us grounded in the sense of understanding the world, of being in control. so it makes sense that we would start with them even if we are not aware of it.
And it makes sense that it's hard to let them go because without them you get a sense that you are just floating away and don't have any to "hang" your assumptions on.
You can reason a lot but there comes a point when things get bigger than you and you have to trust some other authority or just trust your gut.
There's not many people that could comfortably reason from first principles and be satisfied with where they end up. (I don't think I could do that)
"support rather than illumination"
Do you think most climate change believers reasoned themselves into that position? I think for >95% of people, belief in climate change is a purely social phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of people don't understand enough about physical phenomena like blackbody radiation to have any intelligent opinion about climate change one way or the other.
Example: Flat Earth. The horizon looks flat, therefore the Earth must be flat.
This is the thesis to the introduction to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Boiling it down, he argues that self-justification is the most fundamental human reaction. We reason after, not before, and our reasoning flows to align with our own justification.
(Luther would be proud.)
Also at a natural (non-man made) level, the complexity of biochemistry and the need to get 30 trillion or so cells working together as a single animal, in the presence of another 30 trillion or so single-celled organisms of random species, doesn't really seem like something that's going to succeed.
Surviving is not thriving. Like roman construction, we just have very big error margings and margin of safety. Things do not have to work perfectly to finction
It's no coincidence then that your brain has a circuit to create backwards explanations for behavior that you didn't initiate, it helps create the illusion that you are a single animal, when in practice, you mostly aren't.
What was it?
I don't know if that's what the author meant, though.
Interestingly, as crude as the diagram is, you can feed it to ChatGPT's data analysis plugin and it will not only recognize what's depicted, but offer to calculate the cut angles for the 2x12s given the rise and run. I was pretty impressed that it recognized the problem without any prompting other than the image itself.
Consider: how do you steer riding no-hands? Shifting your body weight makes the front wheel turn (because of the "rake"), but now your bodyweight is on the outer side of the turn! Hold it for a (brief!) moment, then lean the bicycle the other way and you have a nice turn in the opposite direction - which is what you wanted all along.
I think gyroscopic effects are also in play, and more pronounced on a motorcycle, with its wheels having greater mass and angular velocity.
Absolutely. They're very unique vehicles, and I find them to be a fun mechanical exercise.
In finding correlations between two things, a tricky bit is finding which two things (a thing can be an arbitrary composites of other things). When we do find a correlation, that becomes how we see it, and we think in terms of this particular simplifying theory of reality.
i.e. there are two issues: (1) reality is complex. (2) we simplify it.
Does this principle apply to this sentence? ;)
The gif of Great Britain looks like it freezes at the end, but zoom in... it's just adding in finer detail.
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: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.
I've done programming and construction and more than often construction is like programming, especially when you are renovating.
While writing that sentence I realized that programming does have a lot to do with logic, which is a construct of reality, and not humanity. So I guess it does makes sense that programming would be fiddly.
I am not a programmer.
I've always kind of seen programming above the level of electrical engineering as working in a social system designed with decisions that seemed like a good idea to a person who isn't me. This point was driven home a year ago when taking an R course and reading the literature discussing the grammar of R.
But yeah, in addition there are physical limits for programming as well. That's what just came as a mild insight for me here. I theoretically had been aware of it, but as an end-user / non-programmer just hadn't really put it together and thought about it before.
Details. :)
But it's thought through as a person who is an amateur at best. I've taken literal introductory courses to programming in Fortran, Java, and R, have hacked together two or three VBscript programs, had a very slight one-day introduction to assembler in the Java course, and as a child was briefly in a summer program that had us "programming" a very simple robot (telling it to go certain lengths in certain directions). A former roommate said my pseudocode (when taking the Fortran course) looked like Pascal, and I used to watch him do some Forth programming.
So in terms of programming philosophy I am really, really clueless. But in terms of programming languages what I do have is a basic understanding of how incredibly diverse the languages are. And that a huge amount of this diversity is based on human preferences.
As an analogy to construction. Yes, there are a diverse number of techniques that can be used in constructions (yurts, hay-bail housing, etcetera). One could also draw an analogy to pre-fab construction as modular programming and libraries as kits (or whatever). But for the most part, outside of scale, it seems that most construction effectively standardized on a few "languages", if not a single language.
That tends to not happen so often.
I mention all this not to pick holes in your logic but because it sounded like you were trying to look more closely at your intuition.
That's entirely my point. Human concepts can be incredibly complicated, or just as bad based on ideas that are foreign to others. Some people like figuring out human complexity, but no one likes figuring out everyone's personal complexity.
Many disciplines are still more constrained by our limited understanding of, and ability to manipulate, physical constraints. The more abstract programming languages become, the more personally complex they become. Like money and verbal languages.
Only if you don't do new things often outside of programming. Everything certainly is fiddly and anything new you do is going be technical if you care about doing it well. I spent half a day last week learning to paint-fill engraving to make labeling. Conceptually it was trivial (coat with paint, wipe off excess, sand back when dry) but there was still plenty of nuance.
We had a curved staircase fabricated for our house and it was absolutely fascinating to watch the planning and execution go into this task. The original measurements were plugged into a cad drawing where we could adjust the number of treads and the position of the top and bottom steps based on our preference. Then they fabricated the entire assembly offsite and brought it in via crane in one piece. Even building the handrail was fascinating as there was a jig built in place to bend the wood to the curve required.
The physical constraints and fractal complexity is fascinating for someone like me who is used to deterministic machines moving bits on a daily basis.
But, really, don't build stairs like OP suggested.
I made a table. The legs are all exactly the same length, but don't ask me what that exact length is - I eyeballed the height I wanted and then clamped all the legs together before cutting them.
Another tip for building things with legs - a 3-legged object is stable on any uneven surface while a 4-legged objects will wobble on uneven surfaces.
This is because 3 points make a plane, adding a 4th point that is not on that plane introduces a wobble.
On a level floor, sure. But for something that will be on uneven surfaces, like outside, 3 legs are stable, even if the legs are all different sizes[1].
[1] Three points make a plane, the plane itself may not be level, but because all points of contact are on the same plane there is no wobble. When there are more than 3 legs, some points may not be on the same plane, producing a wobble.
https://www.blocklayer.com/stairs/straighteng, click "Show Notching Template", then "Diagrams to PDF"
That way, there will be far less chances that bolts spontaneously rip off and stairs go down, nor the lengths of pillars to have to be critical dimensions. The pillars can optionally be cut to precise lengths to be screwed through both steps and slopes for maximum Apple-ness, or, can be lazily cut to long-enough lengths, nailed through to steps from the "outside", and used as base for handrails as if it had been the plan.
(dc: not an engineering advise. consult a real engineer for safety. Also add cross beams in width-height plane, they help tremendously)
What OP was really making were misused ladders.
I mean take something practical like a mortgage. It's fairly easy to calculate the annuities using a geometric series, but that places it beyond most people's mathematical skills. Sure you could use a special calculator, or if you're adventurous look up the formula (beware though, Wikipedia is bound to lead to errors by defining the monthly rate as yearly rate / 12), and then it probably may not like doing mathematics at all but neither do you really understand what's happening.
Saw this quote on an art blog showing SEMs of diatoms [2]
[1] https://butdoesitfloat.com/Diatoms [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom
edit link
And I think that one can clearly and substantively “get” and intuitively understand and intelligently work with an amortizing loan without needing to understand whatever level of math is required to comprehend why pressing (g) (12i) on an HP 12c is not an atomically precise representation of of the answer out to the 12th decimal place.
Looks like all the calculators do that as well. What's the right way?
$$ \left( 1 + \frac{i_a}{n_a} \right)^{n_a} = \left( 1 + \frac{i_b}{n_b} \right)^{n_b} = \left( 1 + \frac{i_{\text{annual}} }{1} \right)^{1} $$
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/effectiveinterest.asp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention
Turns out there is a surprinsing amount of details here as well. And you don't have all parameters for the calculation, like often in life.
Lead to errors relative to what? The mathematical idealisation or the actual practice?
Are you referring to this page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_calculator
"Since the quoted yearly percentage rate is not a compounded rate, the monthly percentage rate is simply the yearly percentage rate divided by 12."
Do you think that the explanation above is wrong?
In practice interest payments are calculated in many "wrong" ways, but that's what it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
It's not necessarily wrong, but it's missing any disclaimer about which interest rates they're talking about so if you don't know what you're doing it will lead to mistakes.
(Of course any other definition of monthly rate will also lead to mistakes when it's inconsistent with the definition of yearly rate.)
Rubbish or as we say here: bollocks. Chippies have been doing first fit for centuries.
Its lovely that someone is discovering how wood and homes work. All power to you. Tomorrow - bricks?
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1741/
Can't you see? Let me explain.
The point of the post is that when you try to translate ideas to the physical world, there are plenty of quirks and you quickly find out what's the difference between theory and practice. That's why many people think that the chatting performance of an AI isn't a good measure of its ability to conquest the world.
And that's why some are so fed up with the doom prophecies, they seem disconnected from reality. But I believe the general opinion has swung too much in the other direction and maybe, just maybe, it's not wise to completely stop thinking about safety.
[0]: https://omarkama.li/blog/the-market-decides-your-project-sco...