http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail
I.
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dadâs preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were âvoluntarilyâ recruited to help working on the buildings we owned.
Thatâs how I came to spend a substantial part of my teenage years replacing fences, digging trenches, and building flooring and sheds. And if thereâs one thing Iâve learned from all this building, itâs that reality has a surprising amount of detail.
This turns out to explain why its so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when theyâre literally the best in the world in their field.
Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2â x 12â x 16â), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building youâll find thereâs a surprising amount of nuance.
The first thing youâll notice is that there are actually quite a few subtasks. Even at a high level, you have to cut both ends of the 2x12s at the correct angles; then screw in some u-brackets to the main floor to hold the stairs in place; then screw in the 2x12s into the u-brackets; then attach the angle brackets for the stairs; then screw in the stairs.
Those goddamn stairs.
Next youâll notice that each of those steps above decomposes into several steps, some of which have some tricky details to them due to the properties of the materials and task and the limitations of yourself and your tools.
The first problem youâll encounter is that cutting your 2x12s to the right angle is a bit complicated because thereâs no obvious way to trace the correct angles. You can either get creative (there is a way to trace it), or you can bust out your trig book and figure out how to calculate the angle and position of the cuts.
Youâll probably also want to look up what are reasonable angles for stairs. What looks reasonable when youâre cutting and what feels safe can be different. Also, youâre probably going to want to attach a guide for your circular saw when cutting the angle on the 2x12s because the cut has to be pretty straight.
When youâre ready to you will quickly find that getting the stair boards at all the same angle is non-trivial. Youâre going to need something that can give you an angle to the main board very consistently. Once you have that, and youâve drawn your lines, you may be dismayed to discover that your straight looking board is not that straight. Lumber warps after itâs made because it was cut when it was new and wet and now itâs dryer, so no lumber is perfectly straight.
Once youâve gone back to the lumber store and gotten some straighter 2x12s and redrawn your lines, you can start screwing in your brackets. Now youâll learn that despite starting aligned with the lines you drew, after screwing them in, your angle brackets are no longer quite straight because the screws didnât go in quite straight and now they tightly secure the bracket at the wrong angle. You can fix that by drilling guide holes first. Also youâll have to move them an inch or so because itâs more or less impossible to get a screw to go in differently than it did the first time in the same hole.
Now youâre finally ready to screw in the stair boards. If your screws are longer than 2â, youâll need different ones, otherwise they will poke out the top of the board and stab you in the foot.
At every step and every level thereâs an abundance of detail with material consequences.
Itâs tempting to think âSo what?â and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; thatâs what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.
You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, youâve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself âman, it was so simple all along, I donât know why I had so much troubleâ. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
If youâre a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really itâs that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when youâre new, and in programming you do new things more often.
You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. Thatâs true in some sense â the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple â but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
II. Boiling A Watched Pot
Consider the boiling of water. Thatâs straightforward, water boils at 100 °C, right?
Well the stairs seemed simple too, so letâs double check.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone at the start of the 1800âs, with only a crude, unmarked mercury thermometer, trying to figure the physics of temperature.
Go to your stove, put some water in a pot, start heating some water, and pay attention as it heats.
(I suggest actually doing this)
The first thing youâll probably notice is a lot of small bubbles gathering on the surface of the pot. Is that boiling? The waterâs not that hot yet; you can still even stick your finger in. Then the bubbles will appear faster and start rising, but they somehow seem âunboilingâ. Then youâll start to see little bubble storms in patches, and you start to hear a hissing noise. Is that Boiling? Sort of? It doesnât really look like boiling. The bubble storms grow larger and start releasing bigger bubbles. Eventually the bubbles get big and the surface of the water grows turbulent as the bubbles begin to make it to the surface. Finally we seem to have reached real boiling. I guess this is the boiling point? That seems kind of weird, what were the things that happened earlier if not boiling.
To make matters worse, if youâd used a glass pot instead of a metal one, the water would boil at a higher temperature. If you cleaned the glass vessel with sulfuric acid, to remove any residue, youâd find that you can heat water substantially more before it boils and when it does boil it boils in little explosions of boiling and the temperature fluctuates unstably.
Worse still, if you trap a drop of water between two other liquids and heat it, you can raise the temperature to at least 300 °C with nothing happening. That kind of makes a mockery of the statement âwater boils at 100 °Câ.
It turns out that âboilingâ is a lot more complicated than you thought.
This surprising amount of detail is is not limited to âhumanâ or âcomplicatedâ domains, it is a near universal property of everything from space travel to sewing, to your internal experience of your own mind.
III. Invisible vs. Transparent Detail And Getting Intellectually Stuck
Again, you might think âSo what? I guess things are complicated but I can just notice the details as I run into them; no need to think specifically about thisâ. And if you are doing things that are relatively simple, things that humanity has been doing for a long time, this is often true. But if youâre trying to do difficult things, things which are not known to be possible, it is not true.
The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.
You might hope that these surprising details are irrelevant to your mission, but not so. Some of them will end up being key. Woodâs tendency to warp means itâs more accurate to trace a cut than to calculate its length and angle. The possibility of superheating liquids means itâs important to use a packed bed when boiling liquids in industrial processes lest your process be highly inefficient and unpredictable. The massive difference in weight between a rocket full of fuel and an empty one means that a reusable rocket canât hover if it canât throttle down to a very small fraction of its original thrust, which in turn means it must plan its trajectory very precisely to achieve 0 velocity at exactly the moment it reaches the ground.
Some important details for colonizing the universe.
You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details arenât automatically visible, even when youâre directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead. âSpiritâ thermometers, made using brandy and other liquors, were in common use in the early days of thermometry. They were even considered as a potential standard fluid for thermometers. It wasnât until the careful work of Swiss physicist Jean-AndrĂ© De Luc in the 18th century that physicists realized that alcohol thermometers are highly nonlinear and highly variable depending on concentration, which is in turn hard to measure.
Youâve probably also had experiences where you were trying to do something and growing increasingly frustrated because it wasnât working, and then finally, after some time you realize that your solution method canât possibly work.
Another way to see that noticing the right details is hard, is that different people end up noticing different details. My brother and I once built a set of stairs for the garage with my dad, and we ran into the problem of determining where to cut the long boards so they lie at the correct angle. After struggling with the problem for a while (and I do mean struggling, a 16â long board is heavy), we got to arguing. I remembered from trig that we could figure out angle so I wanted to go dig up my textbook and think about it. My dad said, âno, no, no, letâs just trace itâ, insisting that we could figure out how to do it.
I kept arguing because I thought I was right. I felt really annoyed with him and he was annoyed with me. In retrospect, I think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and I donât think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and see if you can figure it out), he just heard âletâs draw some diagrams and compute the angleâ and didnât think that was the solution, and if he had appreciated the thing that I saw I think he would have been more open to drawing some diagrams. But at the same time, he also understood that diagrams and math donât account for the shape of the wood, which I did not appreciate. If we had been able to get these points across, we could have come to consensus. Drawing a diagram was probably a good idea, but computing the angle was probably not. Instead we stayed annoyed at each other for the next 3 hours.
Before youâve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. Itâs hard to put your attention on them because you donât even know what youâre looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things youâre good at?
This means itâs really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you havenât noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.
Thatâs why if you ask an anti-climate change person (or a climate scientist) âwhat could convince you you were wrong?â youâll likely get back an answer like âif it turned out all the data on my side was fakedâ or some other extremely strong requirement for evidence rather than âI would start doubting if I noticed numerous important mistakes in the details my sideâs data and my colleagues didnât want to talk about itâ. The second case is much more likely than the first, but youâll never see it if youâre not paying close attention.
If youâre trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just canât see it.
This problem is not easy to fix, but itâs not impossible either. Iâve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why. In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldnât have accomplished much if Sarah hadnât pointed out that one thing. As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.
If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived.