Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail

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.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve 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 ‘man, it was so simple all along, I ... See more

If you’re 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 can’t see it.

If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail. This turns out to explain why it's so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck.  Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field.

The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.

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. Do you remember the insights that we... See more

Another way to see that noticing the right details is hard, is that different people end up noticing different details.