Reality has a surprising amount of detail

This is why I like Naruto as a rationalist fanfic substrate: perceptual skills are explicitly upstream of action skills in the naruto universe. I think this mirrors the real universe and explains much of the valley of bad self-help. Action skills are pointless if you don't have the cues on when where and why to deploy them.

Another frame on the same concept: don't keep teaching people spells when their mana pool size sucks.

I think the first time this hit me I was looking at some software which allowed you to generate the Mandelbrot set and zoom into any level of detail you wanted, and thinking "how can this be possible? Does it really go on forever?" But it wasn't just seeing the level of detail go on infinitely that drove the significance home, but rather when I finally looked up the algorithm that generates the Mandelbrot set, and saw how simple it was. That was what made me first think, "Yeah, we probably can't know everything there is to know."

This felt important but I'm not quite sure what my next action is supposed to be.

John Maxwell posted this quote:

The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.

-- Daniel Kahneman

Hey John, 

Just thought I would drop you a note to thank you for taking the time to write this post so that people like me can hopefully learn something new about themselves or the world.

I hope that life is treating you well.

Adrian

If you want to see a billion examples of details mattering, watch anything about shipbuilding by this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM6R81SiKgA

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.

Is that the reason?

I would guess that it has more to do with software being a stack of abstractions on top of each other, though I'm not sure one way or the other.

Took me zero time to adopt what jsaltiver says here. I'm fortunate to have had a lot of experience programming, and then recently done a lot of custom furniture and woodworking. There is a very large difference between just thinking about something and working with its physical manifestation (or source code). Often, with wood and buildings, theory is worth a tiny fraction of tacit knowledge.

Something to mix in here: The Secret of Our Success (Henrich) is partly about learning from others, and how that dominates over self-discovered knowledge. It's worth it to reflect on whether/how he and the other cultural evolutionists are right about this when so much actual knowledge must be accumulated via tacit means. "Learning from others" might be just as bad as thought knowledge unless it is done the right way.

Thanks for the post. 

Your concerns are quite similar to Michael Polanyi's ideas about the primacy of tacit knowledge, how the explicit knowledge we have — is built on a layer of hard-won tacit knowledge.

It gets even harder when the material you're working with is other human beings, because there one doesn't have quite as crisp a 'reality' to juxtapose with your own understanding. 

I tried to express that in this piece which, mentions ladders — which lines up nicely with your stairs ;)

If you — or anyone else — is still keeping an eye on this thread, I'd be interested in your reaction.

It's also a pity these posts haven't kept going. I loved this one.  

Great thoughts. I was curious to know if I could solve the tracing stairs problem; I am have no carpentry experience to speak of but, I teach math so it piqued my interest.

My solution was that if you have a board you know is square on the end, (say a short 6” piece of one of the 2x12’s) what I would do it stand it vertically on the floor next to the board you are tracing in the exact position you want the diagonal board to be in. The short board simply translates the fools up the board at the correct angle at that place. You can do the same thing off the wall for the vertical trace. One you have those lines on your board you can easily copy it to the correct location on the 2x12.

Anyway, thanks for the great read and insight.

Best Regards, Andy

So, how do you "trace" the angle? I've been stuck looking at where my shed ramp should go for a year.

 What I have noticed after grad school in history, which in today's world is highly beholden to "theory," is that people have forgotten, or never learned, that models are not reality. Models are ways for our minds to reduce the infinite "details" of reality to a manageable shape or figure that we can turn over in our minds and talk to each other about, but they are not reality. We all know what the model of an atom or of the solar system looks like. But those models are real as models with their own bucket of details, but they are neither the atom nor the solar system. That we are ready to go to war to defend our models is a form of blindness. It's like the old question of the screen door. You can look at the screen, or you can look through it.

Ours is an age conspicuous for its lack of humility. You see it everywhere. Are we collecting details as evidence from which to draw a conclusion, or are we assembling data to support the conclusion to which we are drawn?

The Devil is in the details, and God is in the details are both true at the same time.

Excellent piece. When I was a teen and went to work in construction my uncle Bob made the memorable comment, "twelve years in the f+*#ing school and you can't dig a hole straight."

I like the renewed idea of putting the shoe on the other foot. This is a very timely article.

“I would start doubting if I noticed numerous important mistakes in the details my side’s data and my colleagues didn’t want to talk about it” . - I couldn't quite follow this. Could you give an example, or explain it a different way?

What's that graph from?

Excellent article....and brilliantly explained. Reminds me of an old saying :

“Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time; but when the noise dies away, we cut open the drum, and find it was emptiness that made the music.” ― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd

Thinking "I've mostly fixed it for myself" might be you getting stuck again. Have you considered that?