PS: I’m back from vacation. Hope y’all enjoyed yourselves while I was gone.
Slate Star Codex has been deleted.
Obviously the inarguably best post was this. Of course I don’t mean that literally; my favorite post was his review of Seeing Like a State.
Fortunately, the posts archived in the Wayback machine behave nicely with Pocket. I’m going to go save a few to read later.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail
Here’s the tl;dr:
At a high level, most things are fairly simple. But understanding the high level (e.g. of carpentry, programming, economics, gardening etc.) only gets you so far. This relates to something I’ve been gradually realizing about wood working: it’s straightforward, but it’s not easy.
Details matter. So what? Those details affect our ability to get things done–from mundane straightforward things like installing a flight of stairs, to fuzzier things like connecting with each other. More importantly, figuring out those details is not automatic, the details I perceive are not the same as those you do, and once I figure out some set of details, they fade into the background…
This means it’s 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 haven’t 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.
As big a fan as I am of the big picture, we can’t get away from the fact that it’s made out of many smaller pictures. Figuring out the world, and figuring out how to be excellent to each other are straightforward, but they aren’t easy.
