The “coastline of Norway” is a more conventional example but I prefer cauliflowers since they are things we act on, by chopping etc. The “right way” to chop a cauliflower, as my buddy @bumblebeelabs once observed, is “recursively”.
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In both cases the solution is to accept that *any* action will change reality in a way that makes your previous knowledge incomplete. So you either have to destroy the reality entirely or accept that creative destructive action creates bits that don’t fit what you know.
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Basically the only error-free map is the entire territory. Hedgehogs forcefully tame it into “rice”, foxes leave it untouched, representing the “floret gestalt”. Destroy the territory through reductionism, or treat it like a holistic map with no agency for you.
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Non-fractal realities don’t have this property. For example, animals are not fractal. So a simpler level-by-level deconstruction works. This is Lao Tze’s butcher, taking reality apart at joints elegantly. Disassembly without fractal chopping. Our normal thinking is like this.
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Under normal conditions, we tend to use “stack” thinking: a set of single-level, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) mental models. We ignore fractal error. We move abstraction levels as necessary, trusting state to stay well-behaved.
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Stack structures can be navigated with lightweight stacks in the computing sense. This is because they follow a finite ontogeny recipe. But large-scale *growing* realities tend to be fractal in macro structure. When you try to navigate them with stack logic, things fall apart.
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The
@EpsilonTheory essay “As Above, So Below” in the “things fall apart” series gets at this.https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-part-3-politics/ …Show this thread -
My gloss on that is: under normal conditions stack thinking in a fractal world causes fractal map-territory errors that self-correct via foxes and hedgehogs serving as checks and balances on each other. That’s complex systems homeostasis.
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But in weird conditions, they compound fractally, collapsing at all levels. The widening-gyre effect. Hedgehogs become part of problem by getting destructive. Foxes give up in frozen inaction. The system gets ungovernable. Self-correction homeostasis breaks down, all unravels.
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The solution is to “think entangled, act spooky” as I recently argued. To arrest and reverse a fractal collapse you have to think in fractal-native scale-free ways. How do you do that in practice? I don’t know yet. Working on it.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/11/think-entangled-act-spooky/ …
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). But it’s possible to take a simpler chopping approach. Like the dicing of potato.