100 - Visualizing Complexity

In the process of staring down my arch-nemesis, aka "the need to illustrate complex things visually, absent any illustrative talent", I'm reminded of the losses in communication that are derived from occasions when communication itself requires more than one type of specialized perspective.

12 pages into the writing of my next paper I can safely say this paper has been more cognitively exhausting to write than any previous work, including the solution to the Alignment Problem. It requires considering complementary levels of complex and dynamic systems interacting to a degree comparable to those found in the human brain and body. The scale and some of the specific mechanisms are different but quite similar. I wasn't sure how the complexity would stack up at the onset, so the process of writing itself offered the benefit of this insight.

The next challenge is illustrating the concepts contained within it to convey the same material in a less cognitively exhausting way. Humans as a species are biased heavily in favor of visual data processing, so well-made illustrations can tap into the greater resources allocated to visual processing, effectively reducing this complexity.

Understanding systems no less complex than the human brain is unlikely to require less cognitive effort than similar levels of understanding for understanding the human brain, in part because more people talented in visual illustration have produced such visual material to educate people on the brain.

This gives rise to the uphill battle against cognitive biases in the learning process itself, such as the Difficulty of Processing Effect, Occam's Razor, Substitution Bias, Belief Bias, and many more specific cognitive biases.

Education is a battlefield, often reminiscent of trench warfare in WWI. In this particular battle, humanity desperately needs a Christmas Truce (1914). The cost of continued attrition is too high to sustain.