The channel capacity thing provides an explanation (an excuse) for having to settle for macrostates.

The 'normalization trick' is another important reminder that our brains are scale-invariant. https://xkcd.com/915/

Caveat that I have read the post but not the paper.

This sounds a lot like Terence McKenna's "Transcendental Object at the End of Time".

But on the whole... wow, you ever get so upset about a presidential election that you invent a new theory of metaphysics?

It's the advantage of doing a blog post rather than a paper, I suppose.

This is kind of like Murphy's Law. Let's quote Richard Dawkins and Richard Hand from the Wikipedia article: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law)

> So-called laws like Murphy's law and Sod's law are nonsense because they require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react according to one's own desires. Dawkins points out that a certain class of events may occur all the time, but are only noticed when they become a nuisance. He gives as an example aircraft noise interfering with filming. Aircraft are in the sky all the time, but are only taken note of when they cause a problem. This is a form of confirmation bias whereby the investigator seeks out evidence to confirm his already formed ideas, but does not look for evidence that contradicts them.

> The law of truly large numbers should lead one to expect the kind of events predicted by Murphy's law to occur occasionally. Selection bias will ensure that those ones are remembered and the many times Murphy's law was not true are forgotten.

So reverse hollywoodism is really a theory on the limitations of humans in their ability to be scientific: when humans go from the data to the trends (stories), they ignore/distort some of the information to fit the narrative. (See e.g. Trump's election; really not that unpredictable, given data like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr..., but easy to miss when reading the headlines)

Back in 2010 I made the prediction that (regardless of the truth) climate change would look increasingly like religion by 2020. Looks like my prediction is right on track.

I feel like things kind went off the deep end in the last section there.

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link. If you think a comment is egregious, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. (Not all users see flag links; there's a small karma threshold.)

The blogger also argues against an experimentation (to prove reductionism false) introduced by the paper he is discussing in the article quite convincingly, I must say.

Here's a couple of extracts from the article that should clear the premise up for you:

"For here is the argument from the Entropy paper, for the existence of macroscopic causality that’s not reducible to causality in the underlying components." <the argument follows>

"...scientific reductionism is false. There is higher-level causation in our universe, and it’s 100% genuine, not just a verbal sleight-of-hand. In particular, there are causal forces that can only be understood in terms of human desires and goals, and not in terms of subatomic particles blindly bouncing around."

In that context, I could maybe see an argument based on chaos theory. i.e. systems being essentially infinitely large compared to their component parts. There could be macro-states that are indistinguishable at micro-scale given any computational ability.

But then...you would have to be arguing against the ability to experiment. One way to compute macro-states of a system would be to duplicate that system.

Without getting much further into it...I see this becoming a serious rabbit hole in no time.