reality Archives » Exolymph

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

November 27, 2016

Wanted: Rigorous Intuition

A significant part of San Francisco’s public transit system was hit by a cyberattack this weekend. It looks like ransomware, but the hackers haven’t actually asked for anything yet. SFMTA is currently just giving everybody free rides. Their email system was also impacted. Employees aren’t sure if payroll will go through properly.

lol who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I saw two different people tweet that this virtual hijacking is a sign: we live in a dystopian sci-fi novel after all! (What else is new…) Immediately, I thought of the essay that I linked in response to the election, “On Trying Not To Be Wrong”:

Like many people, I’ve thought 2016 was a surreal year; the Cubs won the World Series, the Secretary of State went on television to warn people about white-supremacist memes, Elon Musk has landed rockets on ocean platforms and started an organization to develop Friendly AI. Surreal, right?

No.

It’s real, not surreal. If reality looks weird, this means our stories about it are wrong. […] And being totally wrong about how the world works is a threat to survival.

Sarah Constantin is right. Reality marched on without those of us who misjudged it. Ironically, since I was so thoroughly deceived by 2016, “The Cyberpunk Sensibility” feels pretty damn correct right now. All those ’80s authors who pioneered computer-noir were more prescient than they probably realized.

Image via ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓. Quote purportedly from I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.

Venkatesh Rao wrote about engaging with uncomfortable realities in a particularly good episode of Breaking Smart:

23/ This means accepting that your mind will need to go into both distressing and flow regimes as required by the situation, and accepting whatever emotions result.

24/ Perhaps the most important emotion to manage is that of feeling powerless. This causes acute distress and strong retreat-to-prowess urges.

25/ But you’re rarely entirely powerless. You can usually cobble together some meaningful, if clumsy, response to a situation with the skills you have.

26/ On the frontier, where there are no experts, and everybody is a beginner, this is often the only possible response. Unexplored nature is the ultimate asymmetrically superior adversary.

[…]

49/ The world is full of people and groups terrified of wandering beyond situations they are confident about handling. Those who make overcoming that terror a habit have an advantage.

50/ When a group of such people, with better-than-the-rest levels of emotional self-regulation, band together, they can form an unstoppable force. That’s what it takes for groups and organizations to break smart.

We can do it. Well, some of us. Which of us remains to be seen. Honestly, I am frightened that I may not be able to manage this.

September 27, 2016

Wanted: Efficacious Heuristics

A system is an arrangement of interlocking elements or moving parts that all affect each other, sometimes recursively. The world is full of them (and in fact each of those systems is itself an element of the larger system that comprises the whole universe).

Mathias Lafeldt wrote about how the human mind copes with this:

“Systems are invisible to our eyes. We try to understand them indirectly through mental models and then perform actions based on these models. […] Our built-in pattern detector is able to simplify complexity into manageable decision rules.”

Lafeldt’s explanation reminds me of the saying that the map is not the territory. Reality (which is a system) is the territory. Our mental models are maps that help us navigate that territory.

Artwork by Kyung-Min Chung.

But no map is a 1:1 representation of reality — that would be a duplicate, or a simulation. Rather, our maps give us heuristics for interpreting the lay of the land, so to speak, and rules for how to react to what we encounter. Maps are produced by fallible humans, so they contain inaccuracies. Often they don’t handle edge cases well (or at all).

Nevertheless, I like mental models. They cut through all the epistemological bullshit. Instead of optimizing a mental model to be true, you optimize it to be useful. An effective mental model is one that helps you be, well, more effective.

This is why Occam’s Razor is so popular despite being incorrect much of the time. Some plans do go off without a hitch. But expecting the chaotic worst is a socioeconomically adaptive behavior, so we keep the idea around. [Edit: Hilariously, I mixed up Occam’s Razor and Murphy’s Law — thereby demonstrating Murphy’s Law.]

My personal favorite mental model is a simple one: “There are always tradeoffs.” One of the tradeoffs of using mental models at all is that you sacrifice understanding the full complexity of a situation. Mental models, like maps, hide the genuine texture of the ground. In return they give you efficiency.

March 15, 2016

Imaginary Numerical Encroachment

Remember imaginary numbers? In case you need a refresher — I did — here’s what Wikipedia says:

“An imaginary number is a complex number that can be written as a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit i, which is defined by its property i² = −1. The square of an imaginary number bi is −b². For example, 5i is an imaginary number, and its square is −25. Except for 0 (which is both real and imaginary), imaginary numbers produce negative real numbers when squared.”

The square root of a negative number has no representation in the physical world. You can hold a couple of apples in your hand, but you can’t hold the square root of -4 apples in your hand. Searching for i leads you to a paradox. Of course, the idea of a negative item is already nonsensical — even regular negative numbers are concepts without material form. And yet they’re “real”, if that term can be judged applicable. The most simple example of IRL negative numbers is finance: any balance you owe can be represented by negatives. But imaginary numbers specifically are used in electrical engineering and physics.

Image by fdecomite.

There are two basic ways of looking at math. Either math powers the universe — it’s the underlying engine — or math simply describes the universe. In the latter scheme, arithmetic is a human construct. I think both of these frameworks are somewhat right. Math is a logical system based on units, and there is no logic without a mind to perceive it. And yet the regularity and accuracy with which numerical manipulation explains our world says that we’re onto something.

In an old Guardian article, Gareth Owen commented on imaginary numbers:

“They are of enormous use in applied maths and physics. Complex numbers (the sum of real and imaginary numbers) occur quite naturally in the study of quantum physics. They’re useful for modelling periodic motions (such as water or light waves) as well as alternating currents.”

Imaginary numbers are imaginary — it’s right there in the name — but they’re not exactly made up.

You know the joke, right? Literature is psychology is biology is chemistry is physics is math. Scientific inquiry always leads us back to numbers. Computer science is a kind of applied math (artificial intelligence even more so) and now I’m getting to my point. The internet emerged from this tension between real and unreal, and the way we talk about it reflects that. VR will be a new realm for us, even less solid in the everyday sense. The requisite devices are built with engineering expertise, founded on a system that no one can observe — we must rely on paradoxical tricks to make it work.

So what’s the conclusion? To be honest, I don’t have a profound insight to wrap things up. Maybe the takeaway is just that humans invented the term “real” and language is a flawed tool. Math is not inherent to the universe, and it doesn’t always function as a mirror of the physical world.

Tag: reality

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