Isn’t the first rocket or airplane also built on simple technologies?
Couldn’t one continue to reduce components to simpler devices until you get to basic joints, inclined planes, tensors (springs), incendiary materials (fuel), etc—that all would have had to be developed and understood before an engineer could design the rocket / airplane?
(EDIT: I realize that I’m essentially positing that Gall’s Law holds if all technology should be reducible to simple machines, and that what we call “technology” is improving, refining, and combining those designs.)
Isn’t the first rocket or airplane also built on simple technologies?
I’m not saying that the first rocket and first airplane falsified Gall’s Law. I’m saying that, had the space shuttle, in the form in which it was actually built, been the first rocket or the first airplane, it would have falsified Gall’s Law.
Suppose a hyperintelligent alien race did build a space shuttle equivalent as their first space-capable craft, and then went on to build interplanetary and interstellar craft.
Alien 1: The [interstellar craft, driven by multiple methods of propulsion and myriad components] disproves Gall’s Law.
Alien 2: Not at all. [Craft] is a simple extension of well-developed principles like the space shuttle and the light sail.
You can simply define a “working simple system” as whatever you can make work, making that a pure tautology.
I would say that Gall’s Law is about the design capacities of human beings (like Dunbar’s Number), or is something like “there’s a threshold to how much new complexity you can design and expect to work”, with the amount of complexity being different for humans, superintelligent aliens, chimps, or Mother Nature.
(the limit is particularly low fo Mother Nature—she makes smaller steps, but got to make much more of them)
That’s not my point. My point is that Gall’s law is unfalsifiable by anything short of Omega converting its entire light cone into computronium/utilium in a single, plank-time step.
Edit: Not to say that Gall’s Law can’t be useful to keep in mind during engineering design.
All of these concepts are imprecisely connected to the real world. Does anyone have an idea for how we could more precisely define Gall’s Law to more ably discuss real expected experience?
I’m considering a definition which might include the phrase:
I think the key insight here is that you get a limited number of bits, in design space, to bridge between things that have already been shown to work, and things that have yet to be shown to do so.
For purposes of Gall’s law, we are interested in the number of bits of design that went into the space shuttle without ever having been previously shown to work. So you have to subtract off the complexity of “the idea of an airplane”, which we already had, and of the solid fuel booster rockets, which we already knew how to build; and also of any subassembly which got built and tested successfully in a lab first—but perhaps leaving some bits or fraction of a bit to account for the unknown environment when using them on the real shuttle, versus in the lab.
I think the key insight here is that you get a limited number of bits, in design space, to bridge between things that have already been shown to work, and things that have yet to be shown to do so.
That is a very helpful way to put it: “Gall’s Law” is the claim that there is this limited number of bits.
Of course, put so clearly, it looks kind of trivial, so I think that we should read Gall as further saying that you can get a reasonable intuitive bound on this limit by just looking at the history of innovation, but that people often propose designs when a little reasonable reflection would have shown them that they are proposing to step far beyond this limit.
This is an excellent idea—quantizing bits of design information.
It would also demonstrate that if a designer started at the “space shuttle” level of complexity, and layed out a rough design, that design would probably change drastically as the components were built and tested, and the designer collected more bits of information about how to make the complex system work.
I’m not sure.
Isn’t the first rocket or airplane also built on simple technologies?
Couldn’t one continue to reduce components to simpler devices until you get to basic joints, inclined planes, tensors (springs), incendiary materials (fuel), etc—that all would have had to be developed and understood before an engineer could design the rocket / airplane?
(EDIT: I realize that I’m essentially positing that Gall’s Law holds if all technology should be reducible to simple machines, and that what we call “technology” is improving, refining, and combining those designs.)
I’m not saying that the first rocket and first airplane falsified Gall’s Law. I’m saying that, had the space shuttle, in the form in which it was actually built, been the first rocket or the first airplane, it would have falsified Gall’s Law.
Suppose a hyperintelligent alien race did build a space shuttle equivalent as their first space-capable craft, and then went on to build interplanetary and interstellar craft.
Alien 1: The [interstellar craft, driven by multiple methods of propulsion and myriad components] disproves Gall’s Law.
Alien 2: Not at all. [Craft] is a simple extension of well-developed principles like the space shuttle and the light sail.
You can simply define a “working simple system” as whatever you can make work, making that a pure tautology.
I would say that Gall’s Law is about the design capacities of human beings (like Dunbar’s Number), or is something like “there’s a threshold to how much new complexity you can design and expect to work”, with the amount of complexity being different for humans, superintelligent aliens, chimps, or Mother Nature.
(the limit is particularly low fo Mother Nature—she makes smaller steps, but got to make much more of them)
That’s not my point. My point is that Gall’s law is unfalsifiable by anything short of Omega converting its entire light cone into computronium/utilium in a single, plank-time step.
Edit: Not to say that Gall’s Law can’t be useful to keep in mind during engineering design.
I agree.
All of these concepts are imprecisely connected to the real world. Does anyone have an idea for how we could more precisely define Gall’s Law to more ably discuss real expected experience?
I’m considering a definition which might include the phrase:
“Reducible to previously understood components”
I think the key insight here is that you get a limited number of bits, in design space, to bridge between things that have already been shown to work, and things that have yet to be shown to do so.
For purposes of Gall’s law, we are interested in the number of bits of design that went into the space shuttle without ever having been previously shown to work. So you have to subtract off the complexity of “the idea of an airplane”, which we already had, and of the solid fuel booster rockets, which we already knew how to build; and also of any subassembly which got built and tested successfully in a lab first—but perhaps leaving some bits or fraction of a bit to account for the unknown environment when using them on the real shuttle, versus in the lab.
That is a very helpful way to put it: “Gall’s Law” is the claim that there is this limited number of bits.
Of course, put so clearly, it looks kind of trivial, so I think that we should read Gall as further saying that you can get a reasonable intuitive bound on this limit by just looking at the history of innovation, but that people often propose designs when a little reasonable reflection would have shown them that they are proposing to step far beyond this limit.
This is an excellent idea—quantizing bits of design information.
It would also demonstrate that if a designer started at the “space shuttle” level of complexity, and layed out a rough design, that design would probably change drastically as the components were built and tested, and the designer collected more bits of information about how to make the complex system work.
Ah, I understand.
Total agreement.