Granted! It would be interesting to see what the scaling limits are. If I recall he provides some scaling laws in the paper for the different forces but would likely have some problems creating wings with the necessary flex as they got larger. Maybe some kind of carbon fiber composite?
The more contraptiony something is, the more closely it hews to contingencies. Borrowing the idea of ecological niches from biology — which are basically bundles of environmental contingencies — feels like a helpful frame: you find inexhaustibly many contraptions in the biosphere. Evolution is essentially a contraption generator.
In fact, this seems like a primary distinguishing characteristic of evolutionary and intelligent modes of creation. Certainly either mode can produce more or less contraptiony things, but the central tendency of evolution is quite a bit more contraptiony than human technology.
> [Contraptions are] ... more discovered than invented.
This rubs me as wrong but interesting. I think the ur-discovery is relativity - replacing gravity with warped spacetime, replacing magnetism with relativistic charge-invariance. It's a simplification that will look the same to every alien who finds it.
I think helicopters are an ur-invention, in that they almost 100% environment- and path-dependence. There is the handedness based on region of origin, but there's also buoyancy / reynolds number / power-density. There are no aquatic helicopters, jellyfish are a better plan there. At human size with just enough power density, you're obligated to grab the span-efficiency of a single rotor which means you're stuck with swashplate and tail rotor. But if you've got more juice you can just go quadcopter and avoid all that hassle. The single-rotor + tail-rotor seems like something you'll only bump into in just the right environments with just the right tech-trees.
I think you're gesturing at things like this as deep conserved quantities, and I honestly can't tell if that's usefully more true than relativity or less. DNA replication / repair is contraptiony and path-dependent, and seems like a more important deep conserved kind of thing than even relativity, so as usual I guess you're on to something lol
"Are there are other contraptions in history, or around us? Important ones, not marginal curiosities like hovercraft?"
Having grown up in India, the whole genre of "jugaad tech" has always irked me a little bit, even when it solved real problems within all too real constraints. Part of that may just be elitism I'm not quite ready to fess up to lol, but a big part of it has to do with just how lazily most of those ideas are implemented. But the Contraption Factor gives me a very neat way to articulate that! Reading this felt like an annoying guava seed lodged in my tooth for years suddenly come loose!
However, in terms of an example, on a not so recent trip to the Himalayas in the middle of winter, I saw something called an agyaari. It is apparently a fairly standard fixture for space heating in houses in the colder parts of North India. Talk about a contraption with no evolutionary path forward! It is literally a huge metal duct zigging and zagging across the room with the vent smack down in the middle of the space. A typical Western fireplace would be the winged airplane equivalent of that, but the kind of heating the agyaari offered in the middle of that brutal winter is something that a cozy fireplace can only dream of. I'll try and find a good YouTube video just so everyone can get a sense of how janky and contraptiony the thing is.
As a nit picky quibble, I feel like your parallel universes shtick is unnecessarily floofy. Quirky, fiercely independent or neurodivergent probably all have a higher cosine similarity to the thought vector you’re trying to express.
Is the SR-71 a contraption? I believe it is the single most improbable aircraft ever created. Or contingent, if you will. There had to be a mostly non violent, intense rivalry between superpowers after turbine engines, but before reliable space flight. AND you needed a genius like Kelly Johnson. AND a big enough budget to create all the one off innovations needed to support the SR-71.
Once a society reaches a certain level, a wide body four engine jet like the 747 is probably inevitable. With enough concentration of wealth the Learjet is inevitable. But the SR-71 was special.
Record turntables are contraptiony, that’s part of what’s cool about them. So many different designs and price points all trying to more or less do the same thing but within fairly narrow physical parameters
Here is a prototype of a hovering design that is visibly symmetrical from Leif Ristroph at the Courant Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boxeUaFl3R8
It's inspired by the way jellyfish move through water so a clear natural precedent there
Cute but nope.
As in… not practical for large enough payloads to be interesting.
I think flapping is fundamentally limited by the medium. Blue whales can do flapping flight in water. Nothing that size will ever flap in air.
Granted! It would be interesting to see what the scaling limits are. If I recall he provides some scaling laws in the paper for the different forces but would likely have some problems creating wings with the necessary flex as they got larger. Maybe some kind of carbon fiber composite?
The more contraptiony something is, the more closely it hews to contingencies. Borrowing the idea of ecological niches from biology — which are basically bundles of environmental contingencies — feels like a helpful frame: you find inexhaustibly many contraptions in the biosphere. Evolution is essentially a contraption generator.
In fact, this seems like a primary distinguishing characteristic of evolutionary and intelligent modes of creation. Certainly either mode can produce more or less contraptiony things, but the central tendency of evolution is quite a bit more contraptiony than human technology.
> [Contraptions are] ... more discovered than invented.
This rubs me as wrong but interesting. I think the ur-discovery is relativity - replacing gravity with warped spacetime, replacing magnetism with relativistic charge-invariance. It's a simplification that will look the same to every alien who finds it.
I think helicopters are an ur-invention, in that they almost 100% environment- and path-dependence. There is the handedness based on region of origin, but there's also buoyancy / reynolds number / power-density. There are no aquatic helicopters, jellyfish are a better plan there. At human size with just enough power density, you're obligated to grab the span-efficiency of a single rotor which means you're stuck with swashplate and tail rotor. But if you've got more juice you can just go quadcopter and avoid all that hassle. The single-rotor + tail-rotor seems like something you'll only bump into in just the right environments with just the right tech-trees.
I think you're gesturing at things like this as deep conserved quantities, and I honestly can't tell if that's usefully more true than relativity or less. DNA replication / repair is contraptiony and path-dependent, and seems like a more important deep conserved kind of thing than even relativity, so as usual I guess you're on to something lol
This was an awesome read!
"Are there are other contraptions in history, or around us? Important ones, not marginal curiosities like hovercraft?"
Having grown up in India, the whole genre of "jugaad tech" has always irked me a little bit, even when it solved real problems within all too real constraints. Part of that may just be elitism I'm not quite ready to fess up to lol, but a big part of it has to do with just how lazily most of those ideas are implemented. But the Contraption Factor gives me a very neat way to articulate that! Reading this felt like an annoying guava seed lodged in my tooth for years suddenly come loose!
However, in terms of an example, on a not so recent trip to the Himalayas in the middle of winter, I saw something called an agyaari. It is apparently a fairly standard fixture for space heating in houses in the colder parts of North India. Talk about a contraption with no evolutionary path forward! It is literally a huge metal duct zigging and zagging across the room with the vent smack down in the middle of the space. A typical Western fireplace would be the winged airplane equivalent of that, but the kind of heating the agyaari offered in the middle of that brutal winter is something that a cozy fireplace can only dream of. I'll try and find a good YouTube video just so everyone can get a sense of how janky and contraptiony the thing is.
Sorry. Pet peeve. The Fermi paradox is deeply disturbing if you take it seriously.
As a nit picky quibble, I feel like your parallel universes shtick is unnecessarily floofy. Quirky, fiercely independent or neurodivergent probably all have a higher cosine similarity to the thought vector you’re trying to express.
Is the SR-71 a contraption? I believe it is the single most improbable aircraft ever created. Or contingent, if you will. There had to be a mostly non violent, intense rivalry between superpowers after turbine engines, but before reliable space flight. AND you needed a genius like Kelly Johnson. AND a big enough budget to create all the one off innovations needed to support the SR-71.
Once a society reaches a certain level, a wide body four engine jet like the 747 is probably inevitable. With enough concentration of wealth the Learjet is inevitable. But the SR-71 was special.
https://chatgpt.com/share/b00760fd-e589-4c37-827a-e12670b9887d
Link doesn’t work
try https://archive.ph/GY7pz
silly prompt pretending a paper exists
Record turntables are contraptiony, that’s part of what’s cool about them. So many different designs and price points all trying to more or less do the same thing but within fairly narrow physical parameters