Reality has a surprising amount of detail
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Highlights
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You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense — the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple — but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
- This surprising amount of detail is is not limited to "human" or "complicated" domains, it is a near universal property of everything from space travel to sewing, to your internal experience of your own mind.
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The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.
- If we had been able to get these points across, we could have come to consensus. Drawing
- Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent.
- Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you.
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The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them.
- This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.
- When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why.
- As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.