So I'd heard a lot about TED talks, had seen a few on video, and in considering this question, I wondered, what can the subjects be about? Here are the 25 most popular TED talks. They're supposed to 18 minutes or less. The acronym stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design". So, some ideas I'd like to see:
Technology: * "Avoiding "Guru Syndrome": Start with the Tenerife crash, where two 747s collided on the runway. The copilots knew something was f-cky but wouldn't tell/challenge the captain, and ended with 583 dead in a fireball as the 747s collided at takeoff speed. In programming, in business, in the workplace, one guy sometimes can be though of as knowing everything. He doesn't.
* "Listening With Humility": No matter how smart you are, and no matter how dumb your client, user or patient is, listen with humility, listen like you're trying to learn, and you can get better results.
Business: * "Stopping Control Fraud": How to create organizational structures which are resistant to control fraud.
* "How to persuade people to give you money?": I am definitely no expert at this, but I'd like to see a discussion. I see panhandler and charities making money - what desire are they fulfilling in people? I see squeegee boys getting money - what desire are they fulfilling in their "patrons"? I see patent trolls, landlords, pharmaceutical companies, prostitutes, government contractors, lawyers: Why do people give each other money?
Finance: * "What is money?": How do we get people to pick up the trash at zero dark thirty in freezing weather, slaughter cattle, lay pavement, build skyscrapers, go to war, with slips of paper?
* "What is MMT?": Funding the government via seignorage is an old idea that typically doesn't end well. Why is it becoming popular again?
* "What drives the economy?": I'd say it's human desire. Can it be reduced to equations? Or do you need a coherent theory of human behavior first?
A lot of successful people like to gamble and compete. They are risk takers, entrepreneurs and the like. Crypto's are another gambling chip, like a non-voting, non-dividend paying stock. From the "customer is always right" file, if people want another game to play, and there's profit in it, give them what they want. Perhaps some emergent properties of this market will appear which may be socially useful. Of course the opposite could occur too. Remains to be seen.
Demand + [good | service] creates wealth, not supply.
I could create thousands of balls of bellybutton lint. If no one wants them, they're worthless. There's no demand for them. OTOH, I could create a car windshield that is totally hydrophobic and obviates the need for windshield wipers and frost scrapers. There would be great demand for that and that would create wealth. If I could produce enough that is.
From that second link, "the process by which regulatory agencies eventually come to be dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating. Regulatory capture happens when a regulatory agency, formed to act in the public's interest, eventually acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating, rather than the public."
At some point in elementary school, many American children learn that Daylight Saving Time was originally intended to give farmers an extra hour of light to work the fields.
That is, in fact, a lie.
Farmers actually hated the practice, because it cut an hour of daylight in the morning, leaving them with an hour less to get goods to market, according to Michael Downing, author of the book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. In reality, the extra hour of evening daylight was good for one thing: selling products....
Specifically we have the candy lobby, the barbecue lobby, and the golf ball lobby to thank for modern American Daylight Saving Time. But we’ll get to that in a second.
Without a cashless society, or a "narrow bank", it's hard to push interest rates below zero. But there is always downward political pressure on interest rates.
The point is, going forward, we may be seeing a plateau in interest rates at these low levels, which has implications for financial markets. Namely, that as interest rates go down, institutions and people seeking returns have to move to other investments, pushing their prices up. If interest rates finally plateau, that suggests that some other tactic, perhaps not yet envisioned, may be necessary to continue to support housing and stock markets.
You can see the differentials in returns. I guess 1 and 2 percent returns on stocks is superseded by the expected appreciation.
If you started buying stocks in 1987, "dollar cost averaging" with your income, you would be in a very good position today. My point is that the game has changed. The financial media used to whisper/joke about the "Greenspan Put". More recently one of the Fed Vice chairs (Stanley Fischer) said overtly that the Fed should take on a "third mandate", that of financial market stability. Today, it de facto if not de jure acts to support financial markets. It is going to stop its balance sheet runoff and interest rate increase program in response to the December stock market drops. This support has changed the nature of the game from dividends to chasing appreciation, since there the Fed is all but explicitly supporting the market. And it's not just here but also in the world's 2nd largest economy, China.
Oh and by the way, I listen to Bloomberg radio for financial market commentary most mornings. And I read The Economist for further observations.
I'm not heavily exposed to the stock market. But there are people I respect who have been, and are today, "all-in" on the stock market. And they've done quite well. I can only provide my perspective, FWIW, and YMMV. I support informed decisions.
It used to be that stocks paid dividends to shareholders. This rate was above and beyond interest on bank deposits, who loaned the money. There was extra risk, but there was also extra reward.
Fast forward to today and stocks are essentially a fun and lucrative gambling market for those so inclined. Money is made from trading and arbitrage, not dividends. The difference between a Google Class C stock share (non-voting, non-dividend-paying) and a unit of cryptocurrency is minimal, other than the class C has some favorable tax treatment. Dividends as a portion of share price is similar to bank deposit interest rates - tiny, with no risk premium, in chance that dividends are even paid.
This creates another market gamblers can play in. It will be dominated by the inside players with dedicated computing setups, and superior information and intelligence, like the existing financial markets. I don't know that it creates anything of value. It's a new gambling game. Central bank prints money, injects it into Wall Street, and it'll wind up here, and in other financial markets. Direct participants become richer, people with 401K's feel richer. I don't know that it will improve health care, education, housing, improve the standard of living of non-participants, or otherwise spark technological improvement.
The reality is it probably creates more de facto inflation for the average local working stiff, having so much tech and finance there. While all these CEOs would like it as it only has a positive impact for them, really who else's life would it improve? And on the other hand, creating more localized inflation, it would likely harm many more. "The middle children of history."
I suspect it's this kind of obliviousness to the average person's life challenges that got Trump, and AOC, elected.
I don't know that it's vanity as much as it is an unwillingness to take the time and effort to understand 1) the workflow the code supports and 2) the code itself. I guess sure, there's a bit of vanity and overconfidence thrown into the mix too. Disdain for the existing code and overconfidence in my capabilities.
If you have have all the requirements, true, full, accurate requirements, and an intuitive, easy to use interface, sure a rewrite can succeed. The successful cases listed in the article (Basecamp to Basecamp2, Visual Studio, Inbox to Gmail, Freshbooks and Billspring) all knew what FEATURES had to be implemented. They had true requirements. They had continuity in management and likely programmers.
Getting the true requirements can be very, very difficult for a new team. As far as the crufty edge cases go... how much of that is a user requirement versus some flakiness caused by a weakness somewhere else in the program?
The problem with eliciting requirements from users is that they can't envison what they truly want until they can play with a real version of the product, and THEN they realize how they want to use it (I guess this is a more of a problem for a new feature). Requirements for new features seem to evolve too. Gross requirements -> user plays with the product -> refined requirements, rinse, repeat.
Yes, prisons protect society against criminals. The other main purpose of prisons is revenge, euphemistically called "retribution" by people in the legal profession to rationalize the harsh treatment prisoners receive.
Also known as "justice" or "fairness."
Many prisoners and their advocates believe they should be able to inflict costs, up to the taking of a victim's life, and incur no cost for it. However, as we compensate farmer for his costs, by paying him for his produce, rather than simply taking the fruits of his labor without compensation, many believe that an offender who maliciously harms others for some personal benefit should somehow compensate the victim.
Unfortunately, the costs incurred on the victim are often quite large, and the offender cannot pay in money. In the case of a stolen life, there is no more victim to compensate. Thus, out of a sense of shared sacrifice and fairness, a cost is imposed on the offender commensurate to the cost he imposed on the victim. If the cost can also deter/prevent the offender from harming others in the future, that is good for people who come into contact with the offender.
In 2016, in the mid-Atlantic region, we had a mild winter. There was one snow event only - but that event dumped about 33-36 inches in the Baltimore/DC metro region. That event was informally called Snowzilla, and it was predicted to the tee, 8 days out. That was probably the most amazing forecast achievement I've seen.
Of course, the meteorologists still screw it up, sometimes fantastically. But other times, they knock it out of the park.
There's all kinds of PII and PHI in that stolen information.
I'm sure these folks don't care, because, like Assange, they're trolls. When they're helping your side, they're described with superlatives. When they're harming your side, they're described with expletives. They don't care. They just do what they do for their own personal reasons.
"When the own the information, they can bend it all they want" - John Mayer, "Waiting on the world to change"
Someone took ownership of this information certainly.
IMO, patients ought to know about professional achievements or sanctions. Just like I wanna know a potential hire's criminal record. Because it directly impacts me.
* The Vatican (Rome) was a powerful political entity, dictating policy throughout Christendom (and still is, but not like prior to the first schism).
* Henry VIII broke with Rome and formed the Church of England which HE controlled, because Rome was thwarting him.
* Islam flat out combines church and state into one entity.
Churches are power centers. There may be other reasons why the Founders banned an official church. But the net result of banning an official church was preventing the growth of a competing power center which could and would undermine the power of the elected government.
I'm typically opposed to heavy government regulation and intervention. I believe that simple regulatory frameworks which create a system of rewards and punishments which loosely cover self-organizing (free-market) systems is optimal.
BUT... the scale of large companies can rival governments. The Founders banned an official church because they knew a church was a competing power center. Very large companies, on the scale of the East India Tea Company, or groups of companies, like the Military-Industrial complex which Eisenhower called out, can grow to rival government - elected government - power. The Founders did not foresee this development, as far as I can tell.
So, for that reason - the power reason and less so the monopoly reason - that government has an interest in looking into how much power these companies have, and to bring that power under control.
Another issue we have nowadays is that politicians dance for donors, and politicians also shake down donors. It's a symbiotic relationship which undermines elections. That issue is a deep-seated root cause, a symbiotic relationship which also must be addressed. It gives too much power to large donors. Power to control the government, rather than people in elections' power to control government.
As far as the monopoly angle goes, I suspect these big web companies may be - MAY be - something of natural monopolies, like railroads or utilities or other infrastructure providers. Limiting acquisitions by these companies sounds like a good idea to encourage competition though. But then, this points to money in politics - limiting acquisitions doesn't create as much "virtual gold" - high stock prices. And it seems to me that "making money now" supersedes pretty much any other concern in American politics today.
* I saw a large red stain on a roadway from a deer which had been struck. I thought, wow, that's a lot of iron which is going to find its way back into the soil. I remember back to a deer hunt, where a killed deer was hanging head-down from a tree bough, and the fellow about to clean it cut its throat, letting its copious blood drain out, all soaking into the soil, returning the iron, and other elements, to the soil. That iron, and other elements, came from an exploded star.
* Take a look at Ultima Thule: two large objects slowly rotating around their shared center of mass which slowly came together, bumped each other and fused. THAT is the basis of planetary formation - objects rotating and accreting.
* A star blew up billions of years ago, creating heavier elements. You take those elements, gravity packs them together like a snowball, let it spin for a few billion years, and voila, you have deer, plants, lemurs, bacteria, and me looking into a mirror considering myself. Imagine that process leading to matter considering itself.
All this was a natural phenomenon. It may well be unusual - there are more common and less common celestial objects. BUT - as a natural phenomenon, is it so hard to believe it's happened elsewhere in the universe, and on a different timeline?
And a poster noted above - our technology has changed vastly in a 100 years. If our understanding keeps increasing, what will it look like in a thousand or 10,000 years? Granted, we might hit what I call the Smart Labrador Limit: You can identify the smartest dog in the world, but it cannot learn calculus because it is limited by its brain. Our brain is a generalized information processor but still tied to, and designed to increase the survival chances of, a primate body. Like, you pack elements together, let it spin, and voila, life - there's a lot going there. Is the three pound lump of meat sitting on our shoulders capable of understanding of understanding the true nature of the physical reality, or is limited from that, like the smartest Labrador is prevented from understanding calculus?
But then, maybe somehow we create a generalized information processor by brute force which eventually is slightly more adept at problem solving and deduction and making connections than ourselves. Perhaps that creation then could supersede our intelligence and understand what we perhaps could not.
To explain the world we have either 1) Science; 2) Solipsism; or 3) Magic. Choose your poison, or some combination of all three. According to my senses and IPU (Information Processing Unit, i.e. brain), hard science has a pretty good track record at explaining the mechanisms of observed phenomena.
One problem is that advocates can pervert the umbrella of science to peddle "advocacy science" or "junk science", where studies based on statistical analysis, improperly used, can yield spurious correlations to support a [social | legal | political | economic | scientific] position. Like the growing sugar revelations, which could be flat out lying for money.
Slashdot Mirror
So I'd heard a lot about TED talks, had seen a few on video, and in considering this question, I wondered, what can the subjects be about? Here are the 25 most popular TED talks. They're supposed to 18 minutes or less. The acronym stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design". So, some ideas I'd like to see:
Technology:
* "Avoiding "Guru Syndrome": Start with the Tenerife crash, where two 747s collided on the runway. The copilots knew something was f-cky but wouldn't tell/challenge the captain, and ended with 583 dead in a fireball as the 747s collided at takeoff speed. In programming, in business, in the workplace, one guy sometimes can be though of as knowing everything. He doesn't.
* "Listening With Humility": No matter how smart you are, and no matter how dumb your client, user or patient is, listen with humility, listen like you're trying to learn, and you can get better results.
Business:
* "Stopping Control Fraud": How to create organizational structures which are resistant to control fraud.
* "How to persuade people to give you money?": I am definitely no expert at this, but I'd like to see a discussion. I see panhandler and charities making money - what desire are they fulfilling in people? I see squeegee boys getting money - what desire are they fulfilling in their "patrons"? I see patent trolls, landlords, pharmaceutical companies, prostitutes, government contractors, lawyers: Why do people give each other money?
Finance:
* "What is money?": How do we get people to pick up the trash at zero dark thirty in freezing weather, slaughter cattle, lay pavement, build skyscrapers, go to war, with slips of paper?
* "What is MMT?": Funding the government via seignorage is an old idea that typically doesn't end well. Why is it becoming popular again?
* "What drives the economy?": I'd say it's human desire. Can it be reduced to equations? Or do you need a coherent theory of human behavior first?
What other words start with 'gif'? Gift is one. Probably the most closely related word to gif. And it's got a hard G.
A lot of successful people like to gamble and compete. They are risk takers, entrepreneurs and the like. Crypto's are another gambling chip, like a non-voting, non-dividend paying stock. From the "customer is always right" file, if people want another game to play, and there's profit in it, give them what they want. Perhaps some emergent properties of this market will appear which may be socially useful. Of course the opposite could occur too. Remains to be seen.
The improvement in the quality of life is the ultimate end goal. Jobs and money are means to that end.
Demand + [good | service] creates wealth, not supply.
I could create thousands of balls of bellybutton lint. If no one wants them, they're worthless. There's no demand for them. OTOH, I could create a car windshield that is totally hydrophobic and obviates the need for windshield wipers and frost scrapers. There would be great demand for that and that would create wealth. If I could produce enough that is.
The term is "regulatory capture", and it's been blamed for the Deepwater Horizon incident, and Wall Street's shenanigans.
From that second link, "the process by which regulatory agencies eventually come to be dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating. Regulatory capture happens when a regulatory agency, formed to act in the public's interest, eventually acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating, rather than the public."
A more "colorful" history of DST:
And another article, from Smithsonian magazine.
And just two more points:
1) Interest rates have been trending downwards for 40 years. This helps politicians as it boosts financial markets. See Trump, who is louder than his predecessors was publicly bashing Powell, his Federal Reserve chair, for running off the balance sheet (the "50 B's") and raising interest rates. Others have done this exactly same thing behind closed doors.
2) You can also see 30 year mortgage rates have been declining for forty years too.
Without a cashless society, or a "narrow bank", it's hard to push interest rates below zero. But there is always downward political pressure on interest rates.
The point is, going forward, we may be seeing a plateau in interest rates at these low levels, which has implications for financial markets. Namely, that as interest rates go down, institutions and people seeking returns have to move to other investments, pushing their prices up. If interest rates finally plateau, that suggests that some other tactic, perhaps not yet envisioned, may be necessary to continue to support housing and stock markets.
FYI, FWIW, YMMV, standard disclaimers apply, etc.
1) Here's a list of top dividend paying stocks, from Kiplinger's.
2) Here's a list of Treasury note and bill yields, from Treasury Direct.
You can see the differentials in returns. I guess 1 and 2 percent returns on stocks is superseded by the expected appreciation.
If you started buying stocks in 1987, "dollar cost averaging" with your income, you would be in a very good position today. My point is that the game has changed. The financial media used to whisper/joke about the "Greenspan Put". More recently one of the Fed Vice chairs (Stanley Fischer) said overtly that the Fed should take on a "third mandate", that of financial market stability. Today, it de facto if not de jure acts to support financial markets. It is going to stop its balance sheet runoff and interest rate increase program in response to the December stock market drops. This support has changed the nature of the game from dividends to chasing appreciation, since there the Fed is all but explicitly supporting the market. And it's not just here but also in the world's 2nd largest economy, China.
Oh and by the way, I listen to Bloomberg radio for financial market commentary most mornings. And I read The Economist for further observations.
I'm not heavily exposed to the stock market. But there are people I respect who have been, and are today, "all-in" on the stock market. And they've done quite well. I can only provide my perspective, FWIW, and YMMV. I support informed decisions.
Do feel free to point out where, specifically, I'm wrong.
It used to be that stocks paid dividends to shareholders. This rate was above and beyond interest on bank deposits, who loaned the money. There was extra risk, but there was also extra reward.
Fast forward to today and stocks are essentially a fun and lucrative gambling market for those so inclined. Money is made from trading and arbitrage, not dividends. The difference between a Google Class C stock share (non-voting, non-dividend-paying) and a unit of cryptocurrency is minimal, other than the class C has some favorable tax treatment. Dividends as a portion of share price is similar to bank deposit interest rates - tiny, with no risk premium, in chance that dividends are even paid.
This creates another market gamblers can play in. It will be dominated by the inside players with dedicated computing setups, and superior information and intelligence, like the existing financial markets. I don't know that it creates anything of value. It's a new gambling game. Central bank prints money, injects it into Wall Street, and it'll wind up here, and in other financial markets. Direct participants become richer, people with 401K's feel richer. I don't know that it will improve health care, education, housing, improve the standard of living of non-participants, or otherwise spark technological improvement.
The reality is it probably creates more de facto inflation for the average local working stiff, having so much tech and finance there. While all these CEOs would like it as it only has a positive impact for them, really who else's life would it improve? And on the other hand, creating more localized inflation, it would likely harm many more. "The middle children of history."
I suspect it's this kind of obliviousness to the average person's life challenges that got Trump, and AOC, elected.
I don't know that it's vanity as much as it is an unwillingness to take the time and effort to understand 1) the workflow the code supports and 2) the code itself. I guess sure, there's a bit of vanity and overconfidence thrown into the mix too. Disdain for the existing code and overconfidence in my capabilities.
If you have have all the requirements, true, full, accurate requirements, and an intuitive, easy to use interface, sure a rewrite can succeed. The successful cases listed in the article (Basecamp to Basecamp2, Visual Studio, Inbox to Gmail, Freshbooks and Billspring) all knew what FEATURES had to be implemented. They had true requirements. They had continuity in management and likely programmers.
Getting the true requirements can be very, very difficult for a new team. As far as the crufty edge cases go... how much of that is a user requirement versus some flakiness caused by a weakness somewhere else in the program?
The problem with eliciting requirements from users is that they can't envison what they truly want until they can play with a real version of the product, and THEN they realize how they want to use it (I guess this is a more of a problem for a new feature). Requirements for new features seem to evolve too. Gross requirements -> user plays with the product -> refined requirements, rinse, repeat.
The best is:
dotProduct(inputs, bias);
This unfortunate fellow uncovered a failure mode of a technology. Pitot tubes icing over (Air France Flight 447 had iced over pitot tubes); faulty sensors and an aggressive safety system (The Lion Air 737 crash); the recent Wells Fargo outage reportedly due to a data center issue highlighted some issues with a cashless econonomy.
Very unfortunate but safety rules are written in blood (and money).
Also known as "justice" or "fairness."
Many prisoners and their advocates believe they should be able to inflict costs, up to the taking of a victim's life, and incur no cost for it. However, as we compensate farmer for his costs, by paying him for his produce, rather than simply taking the fruits of his labor without compensation, many believe that an offender who maliciously harms others for some personal benefit should somehow compensate the victim.
Unfortunately, the costs incurred on the victim are often quite large, and the offender cannot pay in money. In the case of a stolen life, there is no more victim to compensate. Thus, out of a sense of shared sacrifice and fairness, a cost is imposed on the offender commensurate to the cost he imposed on the victim. If the cost can also deter/prevent the offender from harming others in the future, that is good for people who come into contact with the offender.
In 2016, in the mid-Atlantic region, we had a mild winter. There was one snow event only - but that event dumped about 33-36 inches in the Baltimore/DC metro region. That event was informally called Snowzilla, and it was predicted to the tee, 8 days out. That was probably the most amazing forecast achievement I've seen.
Of course, the meteorologists still screw it up, sometimes fantastically. But other times, they knock it out of the park.
There's all kinds of PII and PHI in that stolen information.
I'm sure these folks don't care, because, like Assange, they're trolls. When they're helping your side, they're described with superlatives. When they're harming your side, they're described with expletives. They don't care. They just do what they do for their own personal reasons.
"When the own the information, they can bend it all they want" - John Mayer, "Waiting on the world to change"
Someone took ownership of this information certainly.
IMO, patients ought to know about professional achievements or sanctions. Just like I wanna know a potential hire's criminal record. Because it directly impacts me.
* The Vatican (Rome) was a powerful political entity, dictating policy throughout Christendom (and still is, but not like prior to the first schism).
* Henry VIII broke with Rome and formed the Church of England which HE controlled, because Rome was thwarting him.
* Islam flat out combines church and state into one entity.
Churches are power centers. There may be other reasons why the Founders banned an official church. But the net result of banning an official church was preventing the growth of a competing power center which could and would undermine the power of the elected government.
I'm typically opposed to heavy government regulation and intervention. I believe that simple regulatory frameworks which create a system of rewards and punishments which loosely cover self-organizing (free-market) systems is optimal.
BUT... the scale of large companies can rival governments. The Founders banned an official church because they knew a church was a competing power center. Very large companies, on the scale of the East India Tea Company, or groups of companies, like the Military-Industrial complex which Eisenhower called out, can grow to rival government - elected government - power. The Founders did not foresee this development, as far as I can tell.
So, for that reason - the power reason and less so the monopoly reason - that government has an interest in looking into how much power these companies have, and to bring that power under control.
Another issue we have nowadays is that politicians dance for donors, and politicians also shake down donors. It's a symbiotic relationship which undermines elections. That issue is a deep-seated root cause, a symbiotic relationship which also must be addressed. It gives too much power to large donors. Power to control the government, rather than people in elections' power to control government.
As far as the monopoly angle goes, I suspect these big web companies may be - MAY be - something of natural monopolies, like railroads or utilities or other infrastructure providers. Limiting acquisitions by these companies sounds like a good idea to encourage competition though. But then, this points to money in politics - limiting acquisitions doesn't create as much "virtual gold" - high stock prices. And it seems to me that "making money now" supersedes pretty much any other concern in American politics today.
Think about this:
* I saw a large red stain on a roadway from a deer which had been struck. I thought, wow, that's a lot of iron which is going to find its way back into the soil. I remember back to a deer hunt, where a killed deer was hanging head-down from a tree bough, and the fellow about to clean it cut its throat, letting its copious blood drain out, all soaking into the soil, returning the iron, and other elements, to the soil. That iron, and other elements, came from an exploded star.
* Take a look at Ultima Thule: two large objects slowly rotating around their shared center of mass which slowly came together, bumped each other and fused. THAT is the basis of planetary formation - objects rotating and accreting.
* A star blew up billions of years ago, creating heavier elements. You take those elements, gravity packs them together like a snowball, let it spin for a few billion years, and voila, you have deer, plants, lemurs, bacteria, and me looking into a mirror considering myself. Imagine that process leading to matter considering itself.
All this was a natural phenomenon. It may well be unusual - there are more common and less common celestial objects. BUT - as a natural phenomenon, is it so hard to believe it's happened elsewhere in the universe, and on a different timeline?
And a poster noted above - our technology has changed vastly in a 100 years. If our understanding keeps increasing, what will it look like in a thousand or 10,000 years? Granted, we might hit what I call the Smart Labrador Limit: You can identify the smartest dog in the world, but it cannot learn calculus because it is limited by its brain. Our brain is a generalized information processor but still tied to, and designed to increase the survival chances of, a primate body. Like, you pack elements together, let it spin, and voila, life - there's a lot going there. Is the three pound lump of meat sitting on our shoulders capable of understanding of understanding the true nature of the physical reality, or is limited from that, like the smartest Labrador is prevented from understanding calculus?
But then, maybe somehow we create a generalized information processor by brute force which eventually is slightly more adept at problem solving and deduction and making connections than ourselves. Perhaps that creation then could supersede our intelligence and understand what we perhaps could not.
To explain the world we have either 1) Science; 2) Solipsism; or 3) Magic. Choose your poison, or some combination of all three. According to my senses and IPU (Information Processing Unit, i.e. brain), hard science has a pretty good track record at explaining the mechanisms of observed phenomena.
One problem is that advocates can pervert the umbrella of science to peddle "advocacy science" or "junk science", where studies based on statistical analysis, improperly used, can yield spurious correlations to support a [social | legal | political | economic | scientific] position. Like the growing sugar revelations, which could be flat out lying for money.
I have noticed that dropping my calories way down for a day leads to dramatically improved sleep. FWIW, YMMV, etc.
"EU must not burn the world's forests for 'renewable' energy"
See also: Unintended consequences