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Comment by pjs_ | Hacker News Reader

Two things that are real but aggressively story-resistant are quantum mechanics and the self-stability of bicycles.

Tens of thousands of pages have been written in an effort to provide an intuitive, natural-language story about what is happening in a double-slit experiment, but every one of them is broken. Of course the math is simple and superposition/entanglement are real, but none of the stories are good.

Similarly, when you push a bicycle with no rider, it recovers from a partial fall surprisingly well - but there's not a good story about how. Stories are told regarding various real effects such as gyroscopic forces, the rake of the fork, caster effects, and so on - but it is also possible (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1201959) to build a bicycle which inverts each of those effects and is still categorically self-stable - at that point it is hard to tell a good story.

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there's a quantum interpretation that is fairly easy to explain, it's called Pilot Wave theory. It posits that quantum effects are caused by a something akin to a bouncing ball creating a standing wave. This leads to phenomena associated with both wave and particle. Interestingly the theory fits available experimental data, as far as I am aware.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave_theory

A possibly related anecdote is one about Richard Feynman. When he tried and failed to write an accessible undergrad lecture about QCD(?), he told his colleagues that meant he/they didn't really understand it themselves.

"If you can't explain it you don't understand it" is something that people with good verbal skills say.

I would go a bit further than that, and posit that most complex or interesting systems resist the construction of concise, accurate narratives and that one reason we fail in our management of complex economic, political and ecological systems is because the stories we tell ourselves about them are too simple to capture the truth about highly-dimensional systems with lots of feedback.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting -- that seeking narrative explanations is wrong, or that the models we have of bicycle/quantum-mechanics are wrong?

I don't think he's "suggesting" anything. He's noting that two phenomena are resistant to story-telling.

This idea that there's an agenda for every observation seems to have started in the past 10 years. I find it very strange. It really shackles the mind, and conversation.

I notice my mind tends to think this way as well. Thinking about why I will think that usually yields recollections of people making "innocent" observations while they clearly had ulterior motives; such memories are in-person events, not this sort of interaction online. That said, it's easy to (read: difficult not to) apply similar heuristics to online interactions.

Not to excuse it; I agree with your conclusion. Hopefully such an understanding can help people to be patient with the behavior despite the annoyance.

Which would seem to argue in favor of what I understood to be the article's point, which is why I'm curious to know what he's pointing at.

The parent didn't make any suggestion that the models are wrong. "the math is simple" means that not only does the model work, it's also simple to calculate. That leaves the interpretation that seeking good narratives will sometimes be fruitless.

That's very interesting about bicycles. I always thought the reason why bikes self-right was because of the conservation of angular momentum.

I think that's not quite accurate. I remembere there were some experiments where wheel had a counterspinning weight attached to nullify its momentum and the bicycle still mostly worked as usual.

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