[gobdovan]

I usually view it the opposite way from the article's perspective. There's surprisingly little detail we rely on, yet things work out somehow.

There's the Popper observation that any model of reality has zero chance to be true, since our models are finite, yet we're trying to describe a fractal reality. It's amazing how few levels of decomposition we need to go through to get something useful, like the stairs in the article (3 decomposition steps, as compared to thousands). If I were to never interact with reality and rely on pure reason alone, I would expect nothing humans ever do to work.

Abstraction and exploration are unreasonably effective.

[danielmarkbruce]

"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate.

"We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.

[gobdovan]

Were 8 billion people all working toward more detail? Isn't civilization also the process by which detail is pruned, compressed and made into abstractions small enough for one mind to use?

[marcosdumay]

Well, there has been a lot of evolution forcing us to focus on the right kinds of detail.

[danielmarkbruce]

It's actually market forces. Evolution has almost zero to do with it. It's the past few thousand years where the vast majority of useful abstractions/tools/puzzle pieces have been built that enable any one person to do a lot without knowing so much.

[gobdovan]

Markets and evolution are both knowledge processes. I think you would enjoy Donald Campbell's essay on evolutionary epistemology from 'The Philosophy of Karl Popper'.

Parent's comment is observing a prerequisite to markets, humans are the only animal with global markets and biological selection happened to produce the kind of creature that can stabilise around markets.

It's also selection that produced the current form of markets themselves. The world could have been otherwise; our current markets are contingent selection products, not analytically necessary institutions, and not guaranteed to be the uniquely best mechanisms for producing abstractions and tools.

[mike_hock]

Selection pressure in general. It's not market forces that decide military viability of one empire over another but it's not biological evolution either.