Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d world with lighting, it'd just be shocking to me if the physics were to blame for the performance.

Good story for getting a handle on the idea. It kind of reminded me of fractals and how we find some parallels between phenomena at every scale, e.g. galaxies and rotating water as it flows down your drain.

Its a yearly tradition!

it's quite a good read, i'm not surprised it's been posted so many times!

It's a sound argument.

The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.

So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What level of mixture is optimal?)

I always think of it as learning to see hidden dimensions, and once seen, investigate deeper or just imagine transformations of that dimension -- extrapolation, inversion, etc. Once found, you can drag around these hidden dimensions from one domain or one instance to the next.

Like sometimes I seem to be in alignment with someone, but things feel off. I once realized the "off" feeling was because I was running toward something I believed in, and they're running away from another thing that scared them. It's only circumstantial we were intellectually walking in the same direction, so I tread thoughtfully in collaboration with this person. It's attractive force vs repulsive.

Once I knew to look for this "away vs toward" dimension, I see it often :)

Meditation has totally helped me widen my scope and soften my awareness. I've found these two exercises also help me get out of my default mode of perception.

Image Streaming[1] is a fun little exercise that has helped me expand my perception of things or problems. I try to do it in a very high dynamic range way -- where I zoom out of a scene describe it in detail and then zoom in a describe it in detail.

There is also a fun improv exercise where you walk around looking at objects and calling it the wrong name. It sort of gets you our of default mode and you start seeing things 'differently' (a touch more vivid). I think the exercise is described in Impro by Keith Johnstone.

[1]: https://winwenger.com/resources/cps-techniques/image-streami...

Don’t ignore any question is the strategy I’ve found. The problem is that some questions fall just below the conscious threshold. Meditation seems to help dredge up the questions and take them seriously.

The way I did it was by deliberately going against my normal impulses. The rule was "whatever you would normally do, do the opposite of that". If you would stay home, go out. If you would eat a steak, eat spaghetti instead. If you would get drunk, stay sober. If you would stay sober, get drunk. Basically, as long as it's not something that's likely to do irrevocable harm, do things that don't seem like good ideas and just see what happens.

The limits on our experiences are usually self-imposed by the fact that we tend to make specific choices limited to specific contexts. The experiences you have are the experiences that derive from what you think is a good idea. So doing things you think are bad ideas tends to result in a lot of new experiences.

Talk to another human

Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.

Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.

Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd like to see literally anything else in the other 29 slots.

second system syndrome

They don’t care.

They don’t care about ‘saving money’, they’re just messing about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like chickens.

On reading the article before the comments, I literally was remembering Musk's initial descriptions of The Boring Company and how they were wildly forgetting or glossing over key details that would mean the difference between exciting leap forward to terrifying death trap.

I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.

I'd be cautious about the word "fractal" misleading us into looking for a scale-spanning pattern that dictates both large and small details simultaneously.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features.

How much of that is new detail versus repeated patterns? A good approximation of all human visual reality fits in a 5GB diffusion model.

Not true at all there’s limits in terms of scale in both directions.

What does it mean for the universe to have a fractal nature, other than that it looks more detailed the closer you look?

I mean, I think it is very poetic to suppose the universe has some sort of underlying fractal structure. But… perhaps the universe just looks like it has a fractal structure because the finest details are pretty small relative to us. At the bottom, the atoms, electrons, and quarks are more like potentials anyway, right?

They don’t have solid surfaces anyway. Maybe we can plot the potential fields in a way that makes them look like fractals? But… my modern physics, fields and waves, and even my mathematical understanding of fractals are all a bit rusty (so, what am I even doing in this conversation? Oh well), but shouldn’t the potential fields eventually be smooth at some point? And fractals are not very smooth.

Therefore I conclude the universe doesn’t have a fractal structure, it is just very small. But that isn’t poetic at all. :(

The other problem is that all the details matter all the time.

Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you are going to have to start to take into account the position and movement of people standing around the table watching it. The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.

And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer the timelines.

Like if you want to manage a economy.

It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level" and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each individual in a national economy. It should be possible to simply plot out the results of their decision making over time and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful policy decisions and 5 year plans.

The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details matter all the time.

Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and decision making based on your decision making, which then changes the behavior and decision making of every other individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the forces of every other economy and visa versa.

Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators. Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the information you are basing your decisions off of.

So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions. The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies based on the information you do have tends to destroy what little value it has left.

One thing I find interesting is the apparent "End of Greatness". It seems like the fractal nature of reality has both an upper and lower bound?

> The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the cosmological principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is apparent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...

Maybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?

No it’s rather obvious why. It’s not a scaling issue otherwise humans wouldn't be able to exist. It’s missing data. It’s like trying to learn to swim by watching other swimmers only. You can keep watching more and more of this but there’s limits.

There are two things that enable us to do it. First we have prebuilt application specific brains. Our neural networks are geared towards specialized thinking related to human living without any training needed. LLMs are free form intelligences with no bias. To bring it back to the analogy, do you really need to teach a beaver to swim if it was always raised on land?

Second text and visual data alone is not enough information to build a model of the world. As humans we have more data and we can control data. Meaning we see, hear, listen, and importantly we can place inputs into the data and observe differences in outputs.

This is why alpha go is so powerful. It’s able to get the input data and observe the output and learn. LLMs don’t do this on an automated basis yet.

its a pretty great realization to come along. We are all stardust, but complicated bits and blobs of atoms and molecules.

There's the reasonable amount of oversimplification necessary to just get through life, then there's actively trying to oversimplify because it makes life "easier".

I judge people very harshly based on whether they accept reality as complex or rail against it. I am not proud that I do it, but it seems like it has value.

I feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people who are unpleasant to have in my life. So many "simplicity-oriented" people are happy to burden others with "the details" but are unwilling to actually "pay" others to bear that burden. They're pretty vile people.

Edit: The people who recognize the value in offloading complexity and do "pay" (often handsomely) and are the best Customers to have. I've had some really rewarding financial and personal relationships with people who recognize their offloading complexity is a service you provide.