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jeremysalwen comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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No, you can only get an answer up to the limit imposed by the fact that the coastline is actually composed of atoms. The fact that a coastline looks like a fractal is misleading. It makes us forget that just like everything else it's fundamentally discrete.
This has always bugged me as a case of especially sloppy extrapolation.
Of course you can't really measure on an atomic scale anyway because you can't decide which atoms are part of the coast and which are floating in the sea. The fuzziness of the "coastline" definition makes measurement meaningless on scales even larger than single atoms and molecules, probably. So you're right, and we can't measure it arbitrarily large. It's just wordplay at that point.
The island of knowledge is composed of atoms? The shoreline of wonder is not a fractal?
Perhaps it's composed of atomic memes ?
I think this conversation just jumped one of the sharks that swim in the waters around the island of knowledge.