The actual assumptions underlying certain "reductionism" or "holism"...

Do you think it's fair to call Internet stuff, or global variables in code, non-local influence/"spooky influence at a distance"? I guess to me it seems like these/there are mediums/technologies for bringing information that is distant in one sense (e.g. geographic) into the current "runtime context". I don't know too much about how compiling/stack/runtime stuff works, so sorta speculating, but. I say something because I've been thinking, as well, about Goffman's idea of an "ecological huddle," a kind of "joint territoriality of copresence" that defines the "natural situation." (See See Cetina 2009: "The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World") Telegraph, radio, telephones etc undermine the normal idea of what it means to be co-present, or for one individual's actions to ripple directly and immediately into another's. Maybe I'm just trying to transcend the local/distant antagonism and figure out what it means in both cases to have influential proximity?

I like "it's not over til the fat lady sings" as an archnemesis to monotonicity.

Would be curious @snav's thoughts on this post, since he knows a lot more about the deep internals of software engineering

just gonna note I'm the only who "liked" this post, y'all are heartless (literally)

What about the communication bottleneck?

I like this poast and agree with it. I think it's time to think about where the drive for reduction comes from. Sure, it's easy to say "people want to simplify things" and leave it at that, but I think there's ways of decomposing this problem that explains most of the behavior we see in it: the communication bottleneck. We cannot specify things exactly, as @hazard himself says in a different venue:

I want to force being super explicit about what things you consider equal/the same
vanilla correspondence theory "my proposition is true if it corresponds to reality" cool. "corresponds" hides a lot.
Peak Materialist bitch would demand all propositions to take the form of complete specifications of the position and velocity of all particles in the universe
cuz "particles is what's most real"

for better or for worse, we cannot present particles as propositions, and doing so boggles the mind: what robustness would a given slice of the universe have as a statement? I suppose we could do existence proofs, but anything higher abstraction would be ruled-out. In the words of a recent president: Sad!

In the above post @hazard poasts:

What does "sum" mean? Or better yet, what operation are you calling a "sum"? If the operation that you are calling a "sum" doesn't reproduce the whole, why did you call it "sum" in the first place?

This is the crux of the issue, and @hazard rightfully calls it a linguistic trick: the idea the whole is more than the sum of its parts is a result of summing over an assumed default. Why are we making this assumption? Because the way we were talking about an object wasn't conducive to describe its subtle, non-linear composition.

If you ask me to describe a friend of mine, I believe I can go pretty deep into giving you a strong model for what to expect from any interaction you might have with them, and even give you a little bit of their soul, but there's lots of stuff I couldn't get across.

The biggest constraining factor is time. I generally assume that I can't talk for more than a minute before it's a lecture. This has secondary effects: I have designed my entire strategy of communication around the idea of a non-stationary conversation, in which I should give the most important bits I have to say about a topic and only expand upon what my conversation partner asks about. This has made me effective but limited in my scope, like most strategies in any game.

The second biggest constraining factor is the coordination problem. I don't actually know that much about how you, the reader or listener, conceive of reality. I have to fall-back on well-established principles that I feel comfortable assuming. For instance, if I talk about what a "government" is I can assume it has a bureaucracy, that it manages and likely taxes land, that it has access to guns. A government is a very vague thing, so just to be able to introduce some aspect of it like "state capacity" I would need to touch on a lot of things to make the grounding make sense. Instead, we tend to talk about the things we know we can talk about with relative ease, so for the most part political scientists who talk about state capacity because they don't need to force their friends to read a textbook to talk about: their friends have already read the same textbooks.

What I see in @hazard's post is a list of conceptual technologies developed because it made it easier to point certain things out, either in formal systems or in natural language. Often both.

I promised myself I would talk in examples from now as @hazard has been pointing out how silly so many disagreements are without grounding. I think I've been doing an OK job so far in this comment, but let's really get into it. Let's make an example of why a given conceptual technology is useful for communication and where it breaks down. @hazard provides examples of where these occur but we will attempt to show where the pressure for their existence and dissolution is.

Approximationism

If I say "There are 27 chickens, one of which is missing a leg, how many legs does the group of chickens have in total?" you will respond "Fuck you, Crispy, why are you giving me homework? And why is it so easy?" Therefore, I will bring a gun to your head and ask you to answer. As you stutter, never having realized until this very moment that the pursuit of answers meant so much to me, you say "53". "Wrong," I say putting down the gun, "one of the chickens has three legs, it's 54." We must make assumptions that certain things need specification, and certain things don't.

It is tempting to claim that, in reality, we would specify these things when they mattered. This assumes that we know, a priori, what matters and to what degree. The double pendulum visualization in OP shows this is not the case. Another case, is to imagine what you should say to a friend who you have setup with another friend on a blind date. What will matter? You may have a vague idea, but you just don't know. You could have 2 years and still miss something vital. We approximate, because there is no alternative.

Furthermore, other people get used to the ways in which reasonable assumptions give people wrong predictions. Every little kid who doesn't like ice cream gets used to the three minute dialogue when an adult finds this out. Every bilingual white American has a canned spiel about why they know the languages they do. Every member of a profession has their little prepped responses to correct a misunderstanding or stereotype that others would apply to them and that they wish to dissuade. Communication is an emergent property, so these corrections are necessary because the way people have decided on words and concepts makes them necessary.

Locality

When I describe something I remember my mother doing back to her, she often tells me "I wouldn't do something like that." This drives me insane, but it makes sense. She does not remember everything. No one does. We use a compressed representation to remember things, and that compression is lossy because we won't know what matters later. One way we do this is by reasoning via nearest neighbor. If I tell my mother something about a time close to another important memory she has, say when she switched jobs, then she not only has a clearer memory of it generally—she has a more specific impression of how she would have acted. Often this specific impression is wrong, for instance because I am referring to an event that happened before a specific change happened, e.g. when I stopped being a loser and had friends to hang-out with on the weekends, something that totally changed our relationship.

Locality is useful, because we need compression, just like approximationism. In fact, in the lives of human beings, locality is just a kind of approximationism. It is also almost always right. Most people in San Francisco don't care about Wisconsin politics. Except suddenly it's an election year and a lot of people do. You also can't walk into a bar in San Francisco and be sure that no one there cares about Wisconsin politics. There are some Wisconsinites in San Francisco, but if we wanted to shit on them we wouldn't be half as careful as walking down the streets of Madison, and I might say "No one here is from Wisconsin." That's the kind of shorthand thinking that makes locality selected-for.

Monotonicity

People generally talk as if more of a good thing will always be good, e.g. "I'll take as many free beers as you have." This is because they are unlikely to encounter someone giving away so many that it will actually become a logistical problem in its own right. So they can assume a monotone curve of utility and speak as such.

If I ask you how much you'll know in ten years about X subject you know a lot about now, you're likely to say you'll know more. This may not be true, you may have moved on in your interests. But people generally use locality to put things into two buckets: monotone and complex. If it's locally monotone, that's usually good enough. And if it's something that has to do with your identity/knowledge then we usually consider our future selves supersets of our current selves. This is useful for planning, because generally we can operate to make any selected properties improved in the future, but not all of them, so acting as if all if them will be improved in the future allows us to coordinate with others about which axes they would want us to improve. For instance, my girlfriend wants me to workout more because I've gained fat in lockdown. When we talk about it, I talk about how much weight I'll have lost in 2025, because it's good to plan for monotonicity if that's what I want to happen. This plan is often confused with reality.

Modularity

People often assume that you'll do well in a community where there are other people who they think are like you. Unfortunately, a community often has more complex dependencies than these isolated characteristics, and so you are not a very modular unit. But a lot of things are "modular enough" and so we'll treat them as modular. You need fruits and veggies in your diet. My girlfriend is in charge of ordering things on Amazon fresh, and I might ask her to order some vegetables. Any of them will do, but I hate broccolini, and when it arrives I refuse to cook it or eat is, so the interface I presented was not good enough. This is often the case with "I'm up for anything." "Anytime works." etc. The point is that, there's pressure to simplify, but it's very easy to overdo. Modularity is actually the most common over-expressed reductionism in language in my experience, because we tend to talk about things in terms of categories, since language has plenty of those lying around. It is not clear if the proliferation of categories is a cause or an effect, so it's probably both.

Compositionality

Cooking is not compositional, but certain parts of it are. Real recipes leave some space for experimentation on the part of the cook, but it requires a good cook to see where these spaces are as often they are not explicitly encoded in your grandma's back-of-the-envelope cookie recipe. Think of an "Everything Bagel". It does not contain everything. I am not in that bagel. It is assumed only certain things will compose well on a bagel. Everything bagels do not contain everything that even could go on a bagel: they are usually salty and do not contain possible sweetening ingredients, as salty/sweet are considered non-compositional. That is why "sweet & salty" is a thing, because it's special to make them work together. Yet, this is all understood and we have "everything bagels" and "kitchen sink cookies" and "anything goes orgies".

I definitely lost steam at the end of this, but as @beiser says:

[we] need [sic] messages that are trash to serve as bait for beautifully sculpted rebuttals