I do think some things are actually quite real and grounded? Everything is shoved through a lens as you perceive it, but not all lenses are incredibly warping.
If you’re willing to work pretty close to the lower-levels of perception, and be quite careful while building things up, well and deeply-grounded shit EXISTS.
To give an evocative, and quite literally illustrative, example?
I think learning how to see the world well enough to do realistic painting is an exceptionally unwarping and grounding skill.
Any other method of seeing while drawing, doubles up on your attentional biases and lets you see the warped result*. When you view it, you re-apply your lens to your lens’ results, and see the square any warping you were doing.
It’s no coincidence that most people who try take one look at their first attempt at realistic drawing, will cringe and go “that’s obviously wrong...”
When you can finally produce an illustration that isn’t “obviously wrong,” it stands as a piece of concrete evidence that you’ve learned some ability to engage at-will with your visual-perception, in a way that is relatively non-warping.
Or, to math-phrase it badly...
∀(x,y)inR2,f(xi,yj)∗b2≈f(xi,yj)∗b
∴f(xi,yj)∗b≈f(xi,yj)andb≈1
* Taking as a totally-unreasonable given, that your “skill at drawing” is good enough to not get in the way.
Working out how this applies to other fields is left as an exercise to the reader, because I’m lazy and the space of places I use this metaphor is large (and paradoxically, so overbuilt that it’s probably quite warped).
Also: minimally-warped lenses aren’t always the most useful lens! Getting work done requires channeling attention, and doing it disproportionately!
And most heavily-built things are pretty warped; it’s usually a safe default assumption. Doesn’t make heavily-built things pointless, that is not what I’m getting at.
...but stuff that hews close to base-reality has the the important distinction of surviving most cataclysms basically-intact, and robustness is a virtue that works in their favor.
I do think some things are actually quite real and grounded? Everything is shoved through a lens as you perceive it, but not all lenses are incredibly warping.
If you’re willing to work pretty close to the lower-levels of perception, and be quite careful while building things up, well and deeply-grounded shit EXISTS.
To give an evocative, and quite literally illustrative, example?
I think learning how to see the world well enough to do realistic painting is an exceptionally unwarping and grounding skill.
Any other method of seeing while drawing, doubles up on your attentional biases and lets you see the warped result*. When you view it, you re-apply your lens to your lens’ results, and see the square any warping you were doing.
It’s no coincidence that most people who try take one look at their first attempt at realistic drawing, will cringe and go “that’s obviously wrong...”
When you can finally produce an illustration that isn’t “obviously wrong,” it stands as a piece of concrete evidence that you’ve learned some ability to engage at-will with your visual-perception, in a way that is relatively non-warping.
Or, to math-phrase it badly...
∀(x,y) in R2,f(xi,yj)∗b2≈f(xi,yj)∗b
∴f(xi,yj)∗b≈f(xi,yj) and b≈1
* Taking as a totally-unreasonable given, that your “skill at drawing” is good enough to not get in the way.
Working out how this applies to other fields is left as an exercise to the reader, because I’m lazy and the space of places I use this metaphor is large (and paradoxically, so overbuilt that it’s probably quite warped).
Also: minimally-warped lenses aren’t always the most useful lens! Getting work done requires channeling attention, and doing it disproportionately!
And most heavily-built things are pretty warped; it’s usually a safe default assumption. Doesn’t make heavily-built things pointless, that is not what I’m getting at.
...but stuff that hews close to base-reality has the the important distinction of surviving most cataclysms basically-intact, and robustness is a virtue that works in their favor.