I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman".
You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.
"Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?
Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.
Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.
With LLMs, The "knowing" you're describing is trivial and doesn't really constitute knowing at all. It's just the physics of the substrate. When people say LLMs are a black box, they aren't talking about the hardware or the fact that it's "math all the way down." They are talking about interpretability.
If I hand you a 175-billion parameter tensor, your 'knowledge' of logic gates doesn't help you explain why a specific circuit within that model represents "the concept of justice" or how it decided to pivot a sentence in a specific direction.
On the other hand, the very professions you cited rely on interpretability. A civil engineer doesn't look at a bridge and dismiss it as "a collection of atoms" unable to go further. They can point to a specific truss and explain exactly how it manages tension and compression, tell you why it could collapse in certain conditions. A software engineer can step through a debugger and tell you why a specific if statement triggered.
We don't even have that much for LLMs so why would you say we have an idea of what's going on ?
It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on. It's a complex system that can't simply be debugged through[1], but that doesn't mean it isn't "understood".
This reminds me of Searle's insipid Chinese Room; the rebuttal (which he never had an answer for) is that "the room understands Chinese". It's just not satisfying to someone steeped in cultural traditions that see people as "souls". But the room understands Chinese; the LLM understands language. It is what it is.
[1] Since it's deterministic, it certainly can be debugged through, but you probably don't have the patience to step through trillions of operations. That's not the technology's fault.
>It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on.
Train a tiny transformer on addition pairs (i.e i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021') and it will learn an algorithm for addition to minimize next token error. This is not immediately obvious. You won't be able to just look at the matrix multiplications and see what addition implementation it subscribes to but we know this from tedious interpretability research on the features of the model. See, this addition transformer is an example of a model we do understand.
So those inscrutable matrix multiplications do have underlying meaning and multiple interpretability papers have alluded as much, even if we don't understand it 99% of the time.
I'm very fine with simply saying 'LLMs understand Language' and calling it a day. I don't care for Searle's Chinese Room either. What I'm not going to tell you is that we understand how LLMs understand language.
No one relies on "interpretability" in quantum mechanics. It is famously uninterpretable. In any case, I don't think any further engagement is going to be productive for anyone here so I'm dropping out of this thread. Good luck.
Quantum mechanics has competing interpretations (Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.) about what the math means philosophically, but we still have precise mathematical models that let us predict outcomes and engineer devices.
Again, we lack even this much with LLMs so why say we know how they work ?
Unless I'm missing what you mean by a mile, this isn't true at all. We have infinitely precise models for the outcomes of LLMs because they're digital. We are also able to engineer them pretty effectively.
The ML Research world (so this isn't simply a matter of being ignorant/uninformed) was surprised by the performance of GPT-2 and utterly shocked by GPT-3. Why ? Isn't that strange ? Did the transformer architecture fundamentally change between these releases ? No, it did not at all.
So why ? Because even in 2026, nevermind 18 and 19, the only way to really know exactly how a neural network will perform trained with x data at y scale is to train it and see. No elaborate "laws", no neat equations. Modern Artificial Intelligence is an extremely empirical, trial and error field, with researchers often giving post-hoc rationalizations for architectural decisions. So no, we do not have any precise models that tell us how a LLM will respond to any query. If we did, we wouldn't need to spend months and millions of dollars training them.
We don't have a model for how an LLM that doesn't exist will respond to a specific query. That's different from lacking insight at all. For an LLM that exists it's still hard to interpret but it's very clear what is actually happening. That's better than you often get with quantum physics when there's a bunch of particles and you can't even get a good answer for the math.
And even for potential LLMs, there are some pretty good extrapolations for overall answer quality based on the amount of data and the amount of training.
It would explain why the information density is so low. I got about halfway through hoping for something clever, then started scanning, then just gave up.
10k words for "migrating code and data is a headache". Yeah. Next.
I don't think this is realistic. A few thoughts in no particular order:
- War is logistics and you're talking about trying to get involved in a war, that would necessitate supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles.
- China is extremely technologically advanced with the largest military in the world, by a wide margin.
- China is the at-scale manufacturing king of the world. In a shift to a war economy, nobody would be able to come even remotely close to competing. They parallel the US in WW2 in a number of ways.
- China is a nuclear power, meaning getting involved is going to be Ukraine style indirect aid to try to avoid direct conflict and nuclear escalation.
- Any attempt to engage in things like sanctions would likely hurt the sanctioners significantly more than China.
- The "rest of the world" you're referring to is the anglosphere, EU, and a few oddballs like Japan or South Korea. This makes up less than 15% of the world, and declining.
- War fatigue is real. The US really wanted to invade Syria, but no matter how hard we beat the war drums, people just weren't down with it. I think this is because people saw major echoes of Iraq at the time, and Taiwan will have a far louder echo of Ukraine. This isn't a show many people will be enthusiastic about rerunning.
* The US has the largest military logistics system in the world and regularly uses it to fight wars. It's a well exercised muscle.
* Being close to the front lines is as much of a liability as an asset. China's ports and shipbuilding facilities will be bombed out, the US' will not.
* This will be a naval and air war. You can't march troops across the strait, and as we've seen in Ukraine, flying them is a no-go either.
* China hasn't fought a war within the living memory of anyone of fighting age.
* You have a weird way of trying to diminish what represents most of the economic power of the world. Let's also add the Philippines and Vietnam to those "oddballs". China will be alone. And don't forget that China's population is shrinking.
* War fatigue is not an issue here when it comes to Taiwan. Adventurism in Venezuela was emboldening. We'll see what happens with Iran. I live in the generally pacifist part of the US, and I think most folks would demand that we intervene.
The most likely start to hostilities will be if China declares a blockade. Someone in the US will call their bluff - with warships. If China starts shooting, we're in a war. Moral outrage is an (often unfortunate) American trait.
You're speaking of a hot war which isn't ever going to happen owing to nuclear weapons. And if it did happen it precludes many of your scenarios. For instance naval vessels are highly vulnerable to modern weapons technology. Aircraft carriers were constantly sunk in WW2. The main factor that shifted after WW2 is that nukes precluded direct war between major powers, so they ended up being exclusively used against places incapable of defending themselves. More generally Ukraine has provided many lessons in modern war, and among them is that experience in invading these sort of countries is not only useless but perhaps even harmful as it can contribute to flawed assumptions.
That 15% no longer has the majority of the economic power in the world, or anywhere near it. There's a great visualization of the G7 vs BRICS here. [1] That's obviously not all countries, but those omitted aren't going to change the result nor trend. Just as important is what "economy" means. When we speak of war we're referring to the ability to go from ploughshares to swords, but most of the 15% have neglected their core manufacturing competencies and transitioned to service economies where these large numbers don't really translate into economic might of the sort we might imagine. Again, yet another lesson from Ukraine.
PPP is misapplied here; you literally get more PPP by having less economic power.
You think a hot war won't happen over Taiwan? I mean, I hope you are right. But if China wants to invade, it's going to turn into a hot war including the US and probably a number of other regional neighbors.
My guess is that MAD will keep the war conventional even though people have nukes. After all, Russia has nukes and they haven't used them despite their failure on the battlefield.
I'm curious where you are from? You don't sound like you understand the mentality of Americans. Your reasoning sounds quite a lot like the theories of victory circulating among Japanese leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
US military logistics minnow in Indopac vs PRC mainland logistics. Peak US war fighting capability was calibrated around adversaries with 50% of US GDP, even Iraq took 50% of USN CSGs + extremely favourable region basing in multi month surge operations. PRC conservatively 100x larger high-end target than Iraq, 150% US GDP by PPP, and more by actual industrial output. Before VZ uber trip, US was flexing and failing vs Houthis, i.e. shit tier adversary that actually bothered shooting US ships.
CONUS targets are on the menu, there's a reason China Military Report from last month included US west coast under PRC conventional fire, which TBH was years out of date, i.e. most of CONUS will be vulnerable, and PRC has more harden targets to attrite and more ability to deny US fires in the first place, i.e. PRC taking out exquisitely vulnerable CSG/unrep/tankers logistics tail drops US ability to deliver fires to PRC to zero, vs PRC global strikes complex chilling in hardened tunnels is extremely survivable.
You can aggregate everyone in 1IC and PRC still out manpower and out produce by magnitude. Hence most will stay neutral for the simple reason they're within PRC logistics backyard which US don't have remote capability to defend against. PRC simply that big in scale, i.e. their acquisition of 1m loitering munitions on top of 1m drones and cruise missile Gigafactory that can churn 1000 components (likely floor) per day makes any US posture in 1/2IC not survivable outside of cope war games. PRC has the fire power to literally fight everyone simultaneously, with domestic resources (no imports) to maintain war economy basically indefinitely.
Ultimately, if PRC starts TW blockading, US will likely look at ledger/force balance and bail because PRC sees through US bluff. Doesn't matter if pacifist muricans demand intervention if PRC throws every TWnese in torment nexus, ultimately US unlikely to out attrite PRC in backyard, and more fundamentally, cannot out reconstitute faster than PRC after the fact. US isn't gambling shipyards, energy infra, semi fabs, hyperscalers, payment processors, boeing/lockheed plants over TW. Now 10 years ago, when US could theoretically asymmetrically hit PRC without CONUS vulnerability, US intervention strategically likely, but this 2026, we see the new national security strategy. Much more sensible for US planners to retreat to hemisphere and accept spheres of influence arrangement. Americans being powerless to US foreign policy is an (often unfortunate) American trait.
I think that, if China tries to take Taiwan, rather than a direct military confrontation, the US might just block the Straits of Malacca against oil heading for China - or maybe against anything heading for China.
China would enforce a blockade against Taiwan. The US might or might not be able to break it. But China would have a very hard time breaking a US blockade down there.
> supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles
I think this one is particularly important. IIRC, it's usually phrased something like "if the USA sends aircraft carriers across the pacific, then China has an unsinkable aircraft carrier 80 miles away: the mainland". It's a huge home turf advantage.
The USA seems to have a very low appetite for helping allies against bullies at present too. And no appetite for taking US soldier casualties.
The PRC will happily sell chips to the West. I live in Taiwan, I don't want it to happen, but people need to stop acting like countries will prevent an invasion because it means the CPC will control chip manufacturing.
The choice is between possible nuclear war, or, the 5090s are more expensive and sometimes Americans can't buy them when the PRC is punishing the west for something.
Honestly, this is the most reasonable comment here, especially coming from someone in Taiwan. I hear similar views when I'm in Asia, which are very different from what I hear back in the West.
All you can muster to eek a gram of joy in your 996 life is internet trolling on foreign forums while you playact at being a communist - because you know as well as I that you can't even talk about communism on PRC social media.
The irony of enjoying the more open free speech of liberal democracies through a VPN while pretending to be a communist vanguard in a socialist paradise is absolutely beautiful to me, my friends and I are very much enjoying your comments. Please don't stop!
You both broke the site guidelines very badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are, or how large the gap between you.
I get set off specifically by wumao/little pinks (the Mandarin term for PRC based nationalist netizens, not necessarily an insult), something about their arrogance while wishing death on me and my family is very personal and hard to resist engaging with.
I accept I broke the rules and will try to avoid doing so again in the future, but for perspective, just imagine if you were Ukrainian, it's 2018, and someone from Russia was posting about how they can't wait for their country to invade yours.
But, I like the site the way it is, and the rules make it that way, so I understand.
You both broke the site guidelines very badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are, or how large the gap between you.
It's weirdly myopic how HN users always think of TSMC as the main factor here. In reality the greater concern has always been containing China within the first island chain. As long as mainland China doesn't control Taiwan they have no way to secure their sea lines of communication.
looks at Ukraine, its white people and NATO wont fight for it. how about another group of chinse vs chinese in far far away? and the global south supports china more?
That's a total non sequitur. Ukraine wasn't a NATO member so why would NATO fight for it? (Several NATO members have given substantial aid to Ukraine.) In terms of a potential conflict between mainland China and Taiwan, the only NATO member with the capacity to do anything is the USA. The other players will be Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Australia so the outcome will largely depend on whether they decide to get involved.
You really believe that "the rest of the world" countries should conscript citizens and go to war to help Taiwan? Most people if faced with this choice would direct you to the place where the sun does not shine.
rightly or wrongly, I'm quite confident the US will not go to war with China if it invades Taiwan - the American people simply wouldn't support it. It's one thing to get public support for dropping a few bombs on a tiny opponent with little risk, as the US regularly does, it's another entirely to go to war with a major power with a very high casualty rate. The US wouldn't have even entered WW2 (as much as the administration may have wanted to) if the Japanese hadn't foolishly attacked Pearl Harbor and then Germany declared war as well. But unlike Japan and Germany, China has the manufacturing capacity and access to raw resources that would make it a very different enemy.
Not really. The world got other problems. Europe is out for now, since we got Fascists at our doorstep trying to conquer Ukraine. The US has the orange clown as president, who is cozy with Putin. I don't think you can ascribe it to others being cowards, if "the world" doesn't react to protect Taiwan. It is right at China's doorstep. The logistic imbalance of trying to protect Taiwan, being this close to China is insane.
In the end, if a war happens, it will be idiotic again, from an economical point of view and from a humanitarian point of view. Economically, of course it will cost huge amount of resources to conquer Taiwan, and it will only disturb trade and what is already established on Taiwan. From a humanitarian point of view, of course many people will die.
The smartest China could do, would be to return to a soft power approach, and continue to develop mainland China, to continue to rival and even surpass Taiwan/Taipei. There are many young people, who don't have the walls in their minds, that the older population has. They don't want war, they want their freedom, and they want a high living standard. All this would be theoretically possible, if China didn't let ideology rule, but instead went for the economically best route, which is most certainly not an invasion.
China's takeover of Hong Kong proved that any notion of "one country, two systems" is a total lie and assurances from the Chinese Communist Party are completely worthless. There's no coming back from that, at least as long as Xi Jinping remains in power. Young people in Taiwan are less supportive of reintegration with the mainland than ever before. Fewer of them even have direct family ties there now.
> Young people in Taiwan are less supportive of reintegration with the mainland than ever before.
Well, go figure, if you run military "exercises" at the doorstep of your neighbor, people are not gonna like you very much, duh. But there was a time before more recent escalations, when lots of young Taiwanese people did not think too badly about being part of China. That's why I said that the smartest move would be (or would have been) to continue an approach of soft power and development, to rival life in Taiwan. Give the people comfort and high living standard, and they are less likely to dislike you.
This thread casually talks about Taiwan being a vassal state of the US during a civil war and Hong Kong being a colony of the British. Yet the world, largely the global south, should intervene and help the global north to exploit the rest of the world more?
Every one gets that far away countries across the world can’t put military bases right next to Europe or the US. However when it comes to China, that is not only acceptable but it’s the anti-cowardly move to support outsider aggressors.
> can’t put military bases right next to Europe or the US
Indeed, Japan and Korea and the Philippines have American military bases on them.
You mentioned Taiwan, curious why? It has no American military bases. Perhaps of all the countries in the region, it's the most sovereign in that sense.
This doesn't make any sense, the USA hasn't touched anything about Taiwan in any meaningful way ever since it became the ROC, and certainly not at all since the KMT was overthrown. In fact American overtures to control chip manufacturing here were rejected explicitly as "economic imperialism."
What's with this Americentric geopolitical analysis?
You mean when the American ambassador escorted Mao to the signing of the Double Tenth agreement because the Americans were worried the KMT would go back on their word and assassinate him? Or in 1950 when Truman announced Taiwan as "Chinese territory" and directed that no American navy presence was to be permitted in the Taiwan strait?
Anyway take up your grievances with the KMT, don't worry, they're about to come crying back into the CPC's arms begging for a shred of political power now that their regime has been overthrown for 30 years, and their efforts to sell Taiwan to the CPC in exchange for a teaspoon of political legitimacy are failing spectacularly.
I think it's pretty obvious that something like this product is going to be the future, but the technology is still pretty raw. Eventually, humans will have some kind of personal assistant baked into their field of view. Maybe we're on the cusp, or maybe we're 50 years out. Hard to know.
That's fine? I mean, this is how the world works in general. Your friend X recommends Y. If Y turns out to suck, you stop listening to recommendations from X. If Y happens to be spam or malware, maybe you unfriend X or revoke all of his/her endorsements.
It's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution that evolves towards a high-trust network because there is a traceable mechanism that excludes abusers.
That's true. And this is also actually how the global routing of internet works (BGP protocol).
My comment was just to highlight possible set of issues. Hardly any system is perfect. But it's important to understand where the flaws lie so we are more careful about how we go about using it.
The BGP for example, a system that makes entire internet work, also suffers from similar issues.
> David C. Fajgenbaum (born March 29, 1985) is an American immunology researcher and author who is currently an assistant professor at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania.[1] He is best known for his research into Castleman disease.
He spent years studying the disease as a researcher. He's an exception, really.
A close friend is considered one of the best neurosurgeons at one of the best hospitals in the country. Brain tumors are his specialty. I remember him once saying he was growing exhausted about his job and thinking of retirement, even when he’s still young. The reason being, most of the other doctors in his team were not very competent and he had to constantly review and correct their work. He’s not an arrogant guy but all the contrary, very down to earth. For him to say something like that is because the mistakes he sees have to be bad. Every time he tried to quit, the hospital threw so much money at him that he could not refuse it.
And sometimes that advocacy is harmful, desperate, arrogant flailing—against the reality one knows is true with overwhelming likelihood—manifesting as "advocacy" or "will" that destroys so many chances for fully experiencing the reality of the precious, remaining, time one has (or one has with one's partner).
NOTE: This is not me disagreeing at all, just your point moved me to make the obvious counterpoint, having been through all this myself very literally and very recently. I know firsthand how important the advocacy is, but also how often it causes nothing but harm. There is a real tricky balance between agency vs acceptance when you've truly lost control of things, like in these cases.
Sure, and we probably all agree that these are personal decisions. If the OP wants to dedicate his life to working on this particular problem, great. Maybe he makes a meaningful contribution. Maybe he just helps his partner make better informed medical decisions. Even if you plan to follow standard of care, doctors often present choices that balance risk vs result.
Also, doctors split their time among patients and their various diseases. You, on the other hand, can focus your study on your disease. If you have a scientific mind, you can become an expert with enough study.
I actually think Google+ was a good idea and it's a shame google now has a dozen different products with completely different social identities. Facebook does this right, you have one profile.
Youtube comments might not be a cesspool if they were tied to your "Google identity".
Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
Maybe this is just me only subscribing to channels where people behave in the comments and the channel owner actually does some moderation, but I actually kind of agree.
Sure, you find disagreements and arguments, but you don't get the 'ur mum gae', the reductio ad Hitlerum, the dongers, and the outright insane takes and paragraphs of all caps that I would expect from Youtube comments. Meanwhile, every time I open Facebook because of some event I need to press 'going' on, I get a glimpse of some inane take or someone writing in all caps because reasons.
There have been a few waves of comment spam, but maybe Youtube actually managed to curb that now? Only took them two or so years.
I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
I've personally seen WAY more abusive and hateful comments on Facebook, from real accounts of real people, with pictures and friends and everything, than I have ever seen on YouTube. This may be very locale dependent, but in my country (Romania, which has a pretty large proportion of people online from very socially conservative backgrounds) you can easily find extremely explicitly misoginistic, racist, homophobic, and just plain hateful comments coming from real FB and Instagram accounts, again, from people using their real names and faces and everything. I've seen far fewer similar comments on YouTube videos, even ones from the same country.
Our experiences differ in that regard. And no it isn't a false equivalence since Facebook's "use your real ID" commenting system is directly comparable to any proposed system to mandate use of someone's ID to post on other platforms.
> I'm always puzzled by such a claim. One can look at Facebook to see the comments people put up tied to their real name and find no shortage of utterly abhorrent comments. Not sure why there's such a pervasive memory-holing of this when people talk of wanting to tie the ability to comment publicly to peoples' identities.
This should give insanely obvious evidence that clear-name policy does not lead to a more civilised discussion. I mean, everybody who went to a public school [in the American sense of the word] already knows this well: "everybody" knew the names of the schoolyard bullies.
The political wishes of clear-name policies are rather for surveillance and to silence critics of the political system.
It does change people's behavior. Perhaps the average person will use more polite language? But it's not uncommon for me to see dehumanization, threats, and calls for literal mass-murder-of-entire-demographics genocide promoted with polite language. Sometimes used by journalists. Sometimes by academics. Sometimes by podcast hosts. Sometimes by their fans. Sometimes by politicians. All using their real names.
I frequently encounter people using their real name saying my family deserves to die. Who would, in a heartbeat, threaten my employer by dint of a relative's place of birth.
Not having my real identity behind my posts is my only means of keeping myself safe from extremely sick people online who have a culture of intimidating into silence those that express views or belong to a demographic they detest.
I don't think Amazon treats their employees badly. Warehouse workers aren't compensated like software engineers, but what do you expect?
I'm sure there are shitty managers at Amazon (in warehouses and in software) but by and large I believe blue collar Amazon workers have it about as well as blue collar workers everywhere. Maybe better.
The issue isn't about pay. It's about measuring so aggressively and turning the screws until you extract every last bit of value out of someone.
If a company is measuring the duration and frequency of bathroom breaks (to pick one of many examples that's been highlighted in the press), something has gone fundamentally wrong.
What if I mentioned to you that a solid chunk of those employees could be given a couple of shares of stock that made a few lucky people billionaires - some that still work there - and it would be a life-changing amount of money?
In addition to some truly gnarly stories / conditions and their staunch anti-Union stance it is also a relativity issue. There is much to go around but it’s not always spread around with consideration for your employees. And there really isn’t a good reason for that in my opinion.
I hear the argument “well I guess they don’t deliver as much value / leverage for the company as others”. I get it, but at a certain point that rings as a completely hollow and greedy justification. Where that is for you is subjective. But for me? Where there are billionaires there is room for generosity.
I can't accept this strange definitional divide between interpersonal trust and social trust. Trust is an infinitely grey experience, and varies situation to situation and time to time.
Trust is just a word we use to describe how confident we are that the future will correspond to our expectations. Friends can lose the money you gave them to buy something, credit card machines can fail, AIs can order you the wrong product, I could get in a car accident on the way to the store. Do I "trust" that these schemes will go smoothly? Well, mostly (except the AI one).
I don't see a category error because there aren't categories here.
It's absolutely the correct distinction to draw. AI will be able to present as a person while behaving as a system. We don't have intuitions for dealing with that.
An AI "friend bot" could talk like an individual, but be controlled by a network that is making global decisions - what if one of its goals is reducing social unrest by undermining the confidence of users with certain political views? What if the network is 25% owned by China, or by Chevron? What if it's perfectly benevolent, but still choosing what to tell you based on its strategy?
Just because something is distributed over a spectrum and not clumped into clean distinct boxes doesn't decrease the utility of discussing the properties of different areas of the spectrum.
You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.
"Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?
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