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Help me understand why this is interesting

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Everything logical has the following structure:

1. A small set of primitives

2. Higher-order procedures that are rewritten in terms of the primitives

3. Yet higher-order procedures written in terms of the prior higher-order procedures

4. And so on

I used the example of TLS certificates in the chromopill article. Compilers also work this way. Python code is executed using an interpreter written in C, which is compiled to Assembly, which is compiled to machine code (1s and 0s), which every CPU rewrites in its own internal language, eventually gets rewritten in terms of electrical signals, then the laws of physics, etc.

This is an intuition that has been around since the time of the Greeks, who came up with the axiomatic system of reasoning. It really wasn't sharpened until the late 20th century or so when computers became fast enough to run high-level languages, and then people really figured out how compilers and databases work.

The really sharp version of this intuition, which is what I am going to present in full soonish, is only known to a small number of weirdos who spend all day thinking about the esoterics of compilers and databases (i.e. not mathematicians, most of whom would struggle to write "hello world" in python).

There's original work I've done/am doing in this direction that cleans up all of the loose ends and warts in the theory.

At the core of all of this is the idea that humans can't do hard things. We literally cannot do things that are complicated. Our brains are too tiny. What we can do is simple things. And then we can take those simple things and compose them in simple ways. You can then repeat this process to an arbitrary degree. What you end up with is things that look complicated and opaque but are simply the result of hundreds of layers of simple things composed in simple ways.

Mathematics is the practice of finding patterns in nature and reverse-engineering their rules. What I'm trying to get at is the rules of how systems of rules can be structured.

Which is I think the most fundamental question one can possibly ask.

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Oddly I literally just wrote a piece about this. You can ignore 1-6 just read 7. it <5 min and to the point.

https://minordissent.substack.com/p/you-will-never-fix-society

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So TLDR if your objective is to solve a hard problem your solution must have this hierarchial first principles approach? if yes, I agree and think its an important insight. All the code blocks of weird math stuff distracts from this central point for me, but we all have our little niche annoying hobby that allows us to derive truths but also obscure their access to others (ex Yarvin obscure history, me self awareness stuff, you math stuff)

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