[HN Gopher] Knowledge is like a house of cards ___________________________________________________________________ Knowledge is like a house of cards Author : fernandohur Score : 60 points Date : 2022-05-05 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (fhur.me) (TXT) w3m dump (fhur.me) | anyfoo wrote: | > A so-called "senior" developer started screaming at the | compiler, then at the IDE, then at the operating system, then at | his colleagues. He was frustrated. | | This is one of the worst traps to fall into. I call it out | whenever I can to people who fall into this: It's never the | compiler, it's never the CPU, and if you're an application | developer, it's never the OS. And if it is you can only get to | that conclusion by assuming it still isn't, unless, Sherlock | Holmes style, you are left with no choice. Never let it be your | working hypothesis, always try to find out how those things | working correctly matches your observations instead. | | Working on very low level code, I _do_ run into actual compiler | and CPU bugs, and just two weeks ago or so I deeply regretted | assuming something to be a CPU bug in an obscure part of it | towards the end of a lengthy bug investigation, after the | gathered data clearly suggested it was the CPU misbehaving. It | still wasn 't: I missed a crucial half-sentence in the spec. | danuker wrote: | The analogy is fun. If you believe something false, everything | you build upon it is also questionable (though not necessarily | false - it might be true for other reasons). | heavenlyblue wrote: | Beginners need some (although leaky) abstractions to start | from, otherwise they will be unable to make decisions at all. | This is why asking questions as a beginner is really important. | | Trying to think of knowledge as house of cards is stupid | because it somehow implies that knowledge is inherently | unstable, which is not true. | danielmarkbruce wrote: | The point is, it _is_ unstable if it 's wrong. Almost all | "knowledge" is a simplification of reality anyway, so it | still holds even if it's more right than wrong. | ben_w wrote: | Philosophically, all knowledge has the Agrippa/Munchhausen | trilemma: everything must ultimately rely on itself | (circular reasoning), infinite regression (which can't be | fully enumerated), or assertions that are not further | justified (dogmatism). | kurthr wrote: | I guess I'd go the other way and say that all abstractions | are leaky... except perhaps abstract math? At least more CS | folks have started to realize that not only are their | libraries useful, but questionable... so are their floats, | their compilers, their databases, their OSes, instruction | caches, RAMs, etc. Knowing the boundaries of your abstraction | is crucial! | | The key is knowing where your abstraction is likely to break | down and having some bounds checking and fault tolerance to | deal with to makes things robust. At the same time having | abstractions (or models for Engineers and Physicists) that | are all encompassing tends to make them so complex that they | aren't very useful or even comprehensible. | | To the extent that knowledge is a model for how the world | works that we can hold in our heads and reason about... the | usefulness of the model is often inverse to the accuracy | outside of its bounds. Including general rel or quantum | effects in most earthly trajectories is so complex and | useless that it's silly... and yet at the same time we "know" | newtonian mechanics is "wrong". | | I'd be happier to say that I know how to build a robust house | of cards for the situation. That I know there are gaps in the | foundation, and I know when it's important to fill them in, | and how much. At the same time, stress testing, realizing | fundamental dependencies, and knowing how things can fail | often just comes from experience. | idiotsecant wrote: | >Trying to think of knowledge as house of cards is stupid | because it somehow implies that knowledge is inherently | unstable, which is not true. | | Not to be a pedant, but actually to be a pedant : Are you | sure? I think the list of absolutely true things 200 years | ago and the list of absolutely true things now are probably | pretty divergent! | fernandohur wrote: | Nassim Taleb's Black Swan is also a great read on the | instability (or in his words, fragility) of knowledge. A | single observation is quite often enough to break what has | been considered solid knowledge for years. | pixl97 wrote: | Eh, you also have to discern between individual bits of | knowledge and systems knowledge when considering systems | stability. | | You can have complete knowledge of a component, but that | may not be helpful when attempting to determine the | affect of that component in a system where you have | incomplete knowledge of other components. | | Nonlinear systems that trigger at thresholds are a good | example of this. | pintxo wrote: | Card houses can be quite stable though: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F6j4e1C4Zk | percent wrote: | The object is not the true form of knowledge - the post is | about a person's knowledge in the context of debugging | layered systems. | bigcat12345678 wrote: | Anyone cannot see the picture in dark mode? | TameAntelope wrote: | I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Richard Feynman said | at one point something about how creating theories is easy, the | hard part is making sure your new theory matches every single | other theory out there. | chazeon wrote: | The physics research today is exactly like that. I have to | compare against like tens of experiments to demonstrate that my | theory about a single thing is alright. But experiments gets to | publish on better journals LOL. | lostmsu wrote: | Very relevant: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion | ep103 wrote: | Also known as why the field of economics is so bad at | predicting the future xD | danuker wrote: | A signal I've stumbled upon recently: | | http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2013/12/the-single- | gre... | | https://financial-charts.effingapp.com/ | branon wrote: | The site looks all-caps to me and the image is invisible when | using the site's dark theme. | FalconSensei wrote: | That explains why I was confused with the image: "why there's | an image with just 2 arrows?" | | For the author: avoid using transparent background for images | like this | HL33tibCe7 wrote: | There isn't any all-caps? | fernandohur wrote: | Author here: thanks for the feedback. I'm not really sure what | you mean by all-caps, would you mind elaborating? | LocalPCGuy wrote: | As another poster mentioned, regardless of the all-caps | issue, users cannot see the house of cards images on dark | mode. | branon wrote: | Wow, weird. This is what I see: https://u.teknik.io/8OVet.png | | Firefox 100, Ubuntu. Something might be wrong with my system | because it happens in Chrome and Edge too. I've never noticed | this on any other site before. | | Works fine in FF100 on Windows though. That's pretty wild. | fernandohur wrote: | Interesting, thanks for sharing. I've just setup the site | so I think it's more likely the error is on my end. Can't | say I know the answer but I'll try to figure it out :) and | again, thanks for sharing the screenshot! | protopete wrote: | Check the "font-feature-settings" in the body style CSS. | The "case" 1 when changed to 0 makes the text normal on | Firefox. | angarg12 wrote: | I think a useful generalization of this is Mental Models [1]. As | with all models, they might not be perfect, but some are useful. | | Also for the purpose of this article, I think its ok to have | simplified or imperfect mental models of things, until we need | more details. For example, we might think about hardware in an | abstracted high level way, until we need to deal with low level | programming, high performance, weird hardware bugs, etc. Being | aware of Mental Models helps you to find your blind spots and | work on them as necessary. | | [1] https://fs.blog/mental-models/ | nonrandomstring wrote: | Lasting and solid foundations are made by experiencing | | Doing With your hands. Seeing in reality. Getting burned with the | soldering iron. Smelling the flux. Hearing the signals and seeing | them on the oscilloscope. We need presence, feeling, the | ownership of knowledge as personal experience, not vicarious | hand-me-down accounts or diagrams. | | As a kid I wired up NAND gates and transistors. When it came to | logic it felt like there was something tangible I could reach out | and touch through tactile imagination. Building a computer from | chips, wire-wrapping hundreds of connections to a 68000, RAM and | EEPROM chips took a whole summer. After that I could see a data- | bus and an address-bus. I know what they feel, and smell like. I | got good at patching dataflow DSP because 20 years earlier I | spent hours in the studio patching analogue synths. | | Descartes Error is a book by Antonio Damasio [1] that talks about | the weakness of purely rationalist epistemology. The foundation | is laid long before we are even aware of knowing and learning. | That book had an influence on me to understanding cognitive | activity as embodied. | | This is why we need to let kids fix bikes, fall off skateboards | and climb trees. It's why giving them tablets and chromebooks | instead of things that get their hands dirty is no good. | | [1] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/100151-descartes- | error... | calebegg wrote: | To be honest, I find those 'st' ligatures incredibly distracting. | Is there a way to turn that feature off in Chrome? | skybrian wrote: | I don't see any in Chrome on a Mac. Is it a font issue? | ncmncm wrote: | I put quite a lot of work into getting st and ct (optional) | ligatures into the Linux Libertine typeface. And, turned them | on by default in my copy. | | And, I have my browser set to use Linux Libertine for _all_ | text, whether "serif", "sans", or whatever the page server | said it ought to be. (Button wingdings something look odd.) | | So, I don't see anything odd on the page, but I do see "st" | ligatures. Just not theirs. | | On my phone, where even Firefox utterly refuses to use the | fonts it is directed to, I see ligatures in the sans-serif | font, which is just ugly. But they do not make the sans-serif | any worse than it always is. | dalmo3 wrote: | I read your comment and thought "STar Wars does it, what's the | issue?" And then I opened tfa... The ligature doesn't even make | sense. | | PS: For those who don't see it, the ligature is a circumflex | connecting the top of the t with a serif coming out the top end | of the s, which is even weirder because it's a sans serif font. | pitaj wrote: | Where are you seeing them? As far as I can tell the CSS styles | tell the browser to use the system fonts. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-05 23:00 UTC)