Surprisingly, yes! 90hz would be considered the minimum here.
As a general statement, no, vision isn’t as time-sensitive as hearing, so the timing requirements aren’t as precise. But when it comes to head and hand tracking, the brain’s also doing predictive sensor fusion, and even “unnoticeably” small delays can be disorienting or nauseating. (Ocular fixation is the most sensitive, but hand-eye coordination is also pretty important to the brain!)
The important number in VR is “motion-to-photon” latency.
Over 20ms starts to be noticeable to most people; 50ms starts to make most people uncomfortable. That’s the total budget for sensor fusion, simulation, rendering, and display, and that’s just for the bare-minimum experience that doesn’t make people immediately ill.
You can do a lot with prediction and late updates in screen space, which is what makes VR possible at all on current hardware— but it’s hard to make up for having sensor data delayed by possibly 150% of the total time budget :)
Your understanding is correct, more or less[0], but there are two parts to strategy: an inexpert counter is likely to be distracted, and to make errors from perfect play. They’re also likely to lose the count, and make errors in bet sizing. The net of those is worse than a non-counter playing perfectly, whose edge is slightly negative but who still stands a decent chance of making money on a given day.
But note that’s a reason for casinos not to overtly discourage counting; they’ll still happily ban a player who is apparently counting well rather than roll the dice on whether they’re counting “well enough”.
[0] Sibling points out that counters will make specific deviations from “naive” perfect play depending on the count, but that’s to push earnings up a bit on an already positive edge. There’s also the element of camouflage, where a really strong counter might deviate in ways that don’t hurt their earnings but make their play look less “counter-y”.
Indifferent to risk, or seeking of risk, or having any other computable utility function on any other measurable that we’d have to accept as equally valid if we want to convince any non-economist that we aren’t just using utility as a weasely word for money :)
That’s not even snark, humans preferring both of higher risk and lower payoff is a canonical psycho-economic result. And even the question of whether the concept of a rational utility maximizer is well-founded is the exact subject of this very fine article!
Sure. I very much doubt anyone seeks risk because it's risk. They do it for the thrill, or for social reasons, or because calculating risk is hard, etc.
> having any other computable utility function on any other measurable that we’d have to accept as equally valid if we want to convince any non-economist that we aren’t just using utility as a weasely word for money
Almost anything else will do just as well. If you can buy it (or the means to acquire it) on the market, then there's always some point at which twice as much money buys less than twice as much. Maybe 10 million is not enough to hit that point, or 5 million is too much, but the curve flattens out somewhere. And if you can't, then the money makes no direct difference, but can still buy you food and shelter and free time with which to pursue your other projects.
I suppose in principle you could actively want to not have money (and not want to give it away either), in which case getting rid of 10 million is probably not twice as hard as getting rid of 5, but that hardly seems realistic.
Can you say more about that? I can see the loose analogy to socializing risk, but I’d usually think of the concept of insurance along the lines of “many small winners pay for a few big losers”; this looks to me more like “a few big winners pay for many small losers”.
The example seems to be in between (it's an illustration based around variance in series of dice rolls). But the principle of insurance is pooling risk rather than the distribution of risk: (and a Lloyd's syndicate bailing out a natural disaster looks a lot like a few big winners paying for many small losers)
The principle of a few big winners pay for many small losers is pretty well understood in other areas too: it underpins Sand Hill Road as well as the social insurance of welfare states....
Hmm, I’m still not following exactly what you’re pointing out. What’s the model you mentioned about variance in dice rolls? I assumed we were talking about the coin flip model where all individual payoffs go to zero with probability 1, so no one has any expected income to pay an insurance premium out of.
The article is pretty pointedly about wealth redistribution, i.e. pooling of windfalls rather than of risk, but I don’t think that was lost on anyone... are you talking about a different model where there’s some sort of insurable situation?
But no, the payoffs don't go to zero: it's heads you double your wealth, tails you lose 40%. That's insurable risk.
(if the payoffs went to zero there would be no benefit to pooling... the only winning move is not to play)
The article pretty pointedly is about social insurance, but it doesn't make a particularly good case for it since it's a completely abstract model which bears no relationship to the actual reasons wealth and income disparities exist and feeding unemployed people might be a good idea. Rich people don't need to gamble 40% of their wealth on each economic interaction (they're perfectly capable of diversifying their own portfolios) and very rarely get bailed out with a share of lots of less rich people's earnings when their investments suck.
The non-straw man version of "mainstream economics" absolutely understands how risks work and literally invented the type of game theoretic model the author is using to show what he thinks "mainstream economics" is missing
Ah, I believe I understand now. No, I’m afraid this risk is not insurable.
Any insurer would have to guarantee some share of the 1.05x EV per toss, call that share itself X. The insurer would keep the remainder of the EV as premium, call that Y.
X and Y are both positive so it seems at first like you should be able to underwrite this. However, the math will not work out unless you change the dynamics of the model in some way.
The fundamental problem is that this is a model for a sequence of N events, and X (and therefore Y) are exponential functions of N. After some finite N, it’s only the insurer’s most recent guarantee that matters to the total payoffs. No previous events are consequential; the brute force of exponential math says the exponent alone dominates.
So we can just think in terms of x^N. At some point the insurer must pay out x^N in losses from the previous x^(N-1) in gains.
In other words, regardless of the premium charged, or the number of individuals whose risk is pooled, this individual’s status as an insurer doesn’t give them any special exemption from exponential reality that prevents individuals in general from remaining solvent in the limit of this model.
(I haven’t totally worked through the outcome table for the author’s proposed solution— I’d encourage you to do that if you think the solution might be flawed. But this does indeed seem to be a situation where any individual who attempts to capture the EV will fail, and only unconditional sharing can succeed.)
There's nothing magical about the pooling of risk and reward being administered by an entity which is an insurance agent that makes the payoff matrix look different in this model. Yes, this includes the fact that sometimes the syndicate returns a little more to its members than was put in and sometimes a little less depending on who flipped which coin toss.
All of which is moot to my original point which was that the OP's original argument that the mainstream economics profession is focused purely on expected value with no concept of risk is laughably wrong.
They're in fact a few steps ahead of him, because they also assess pooling of earnings in terms of moral hazard and adverse selection, instead of naively assuming that expected return and downside risks are evenly distributed across the population and invariant with respect to wealth pooling. Adverse selection is the actual reason private insurers are unlikely to take on the burden of insuring things like unemployment (people that find it easy to find employment and have lots of savings will rationally avoid participating unless its compulsory, which means more people wanting to claim on it than pay in), but of course introducing variation in likelihood of payoffs to the model leads to potentially very different outcomes...
So, first, you're right to be skeptical. The basic claim is this:
"Expected value (a mathematical object belonging to the very rigorous field of probability theory) is often used by economists in a non-rigorous way."
The covert implication is something along the lines of, economists do this deliberately to gain the benefit of rigor that the empirical performance of economic theory hasn't earned. You should definitely interpret that first as a political argument, motivated by a metaphysical argument, motivated by a mathematical argument.
And you're right to hear some alarm bells, because that's certainly a controversial claim.
But it's not an outlandish claim. The field of psycho-economics is basically the study of the many ways that people observably, empirically don't make economic decisions on the basis of EV maximization, so what more need be said?
And there are plenty of other metaphysical arguments that you probably accept in principle. Pascal's Wager, and the converse Pascal's Mugging, clearly show that EV maximization at least has to "break down at high energy levels", to borrow a metaphor.
So, this thought experiment is one of those, but it's actually a pretty elegant one:
In a series of two coin flips you have four outcomes, so your expected value is a quarter of (0.6 x 0.6) + (0.6 x 1.5) + (1.5 x 0.6) + (1.5 x 1.5) = about 4.4 over four = about 110% of your stake. So this is a winning gamble, so EV maximization predicts you will take it.
However: more than half of that EV, (1.5 x 1.5)/4 = 56% out of that 110%, comes from the relatively rare event in which you win two coin flips in a row.
The other three outcomes have to share the remaining 54% EV between them. It should make sense by now that if you lose, and play again, you can expect to lose again, despite still having a positive EV on the toss.
So the essential question the author is asking, the thing that makes this metaphysically controversial but not mathematically so, is this:
Assuming there's no mechanism to actually share the EV, how much should those three out of four parallel-universe versions of you who individually lose, and collectively have to come up with the cash to pay out 2x winnings, care about the one out of four of you who's taking those 2x winnings home?
And the political question is: Does more than 1/4 of you still think EV is a good basis for decision making absent a mechanism to actually share the EV?
> It should make sense by now that if you lose, and play again, you can expect to lose again, despite still having a positive EV on the toss.
Too late to edit but I feel like I should highlight this more, because it looks like the place something would be swept under the rug:
Yes, the individual who wins two flips in a row is still ahead even if they lose the next two flips. If they win the first four, they can afford to lose three more.
And if they win the first five, they can afford to lose… still only three. Five to four no longer breaks even.
That’s the thing that, if it doesn’t seem intuitive, is a meaningful insight. “This +EV dynamics is not ergodic” means:
In the limit, a) the individual who wins every single coin flip can afford to pay the losses of everyone else and profit, and b) no other individual breaks even.
One question, though: do you think it would make the rest of your comment materially worse communication if you added just one excessively positive but non-load-bearing sentence at the beginning? Maybe something like “That’s a good perspective to bring!”
Maybe that’s not the way you communicate most sincerely, the way it is for me and others. Maybe I sound insincere to you right now, in which case, please do say so!
But all else being equal, if you knew that that single change would make me and others materially more receptive to the rest of your comment, would you consider just… doing it anyways, out of pure self-interest?
If we can be honest with one another though, your comment reads to me as not just insincere, but condescending. This might be cultural more than ..'genderal' - I was hearing echoes of 'thank you so much! You're so welcome!' familiar from even the most mundane interactions in the US. (It's quite jarring when you say 'thanks', for having been sold something in a shop say, expecting to leave it at that, to be told you're so welcome.)
What I was intending to get at above was that if I have a duty to communicate with you as you'd like to be communicated with(!), then surely you would also want to reciprocate? If there are just these two 'communication personas' on the team, and they're evenly split, isn't it a lot of effort for nothing, aren't we better off using what makes most sense to us personally, since just as many others agree as disagree anyway?
In principle, I agree -- no one is entitled to one communication style or another, and we should all respect each others' preferences.
But the problem is that the flow between those personas is not bidirectional.
Again, generalizing a lot here, but let's call them Cold and Warm personas.
If a Cold receives a Warm message, generally speaking the worst they might feel is that the other person is being inauthentic. In my experience, what usually happens is that they just filter out all the niceties as extraneous and get on with their day. As time goes on, they won't necessarily change their communications or relationship with that person -- after all, they're still getting what they need from them.
On the other hand, if a Warm receives a Cold message -- if they notice a pattern of receiving Cold messages -- they might take that as standoffishness or outright hostility. Even if it's not that negative, the Warm simply won't build as much trust as they otherwise might. They aren't getting what they need.
So in this scenario, if everyone communicates as they naturally would, Colds don't notice anything wrong, while Warms feel like they're actively missing out on something important to them.
I would also note that, again in my experience, most people who describe themselves as Cold communicators ("I don't want fluff, just communicate directly with me") actually really appreciate people who communicate with lots of social niceties. They respond to them more quickly, they're willing to explain misconceptions, and so on. They just don't think it's because of communication style.
I don't agree. I am what you would call a Cold, but maybe just have slightly more social awareness than you're imagining. I can't just "filter out the niceties". I perceive them as setting the expectation that I will reciprocate similarly. I usually at least try to do so, but it not intuitive for me and requires a lot of energy.
not a big deal either way, I can muster up a few friendly greetings on my way into the office every day, and the Warms I encounter could also try to read the room a little better. I just don't agree that the impact is as asymmetric as you say.
> I perceive them as setting the expectation that I will reciprocate similarly.
You know, this might be challenging to hear... I think there is such an expectation. And along the lines of what 'ketzo said above, I kind of think it's a categorically good expectation.
The only thing you might be missing, not because you're not socially sensitive, but just because it's non-native communication to you, is that those people genuinely care. The expectation isn't that you'll respond with a cheery reply-- it's that you'll respond with care.
What I might put on the table for you is, what if you think about it as replying in kind, rather than in form? If someone says something cheerily nice to you, you don't have to say "omg thank you!! :D". You can just say "Thank you.", from the heart, however you say it when you really mean it.
And yeah, some people will still take that as you being unkind. And if you mean it, that means they're the socially insensitive ones. They're the ones who don't really care! You don't owe them anything more.
But... I think you might be surprised at how many people really are willing to meet you exactly where you are, as long as you really do care.
> You know, this might be challenging to hear... I think there is such an expectation. And along the lines of what 'ketzo said above, I kind of think it's a categorically good expectation.
> The only thing you might be missing, not because you're not socially sensitive, but just because it's non-native communication to you, is that those people genuinely care. The expectation isn't that you'll respond with a cheery reply-- it's that you'll respond with care.
I will genuinely reflect on this, but my initial reaction is that I still don't agree. I think context may be important here.
I am going to work for a very specific reason: to complete enough tasks between 9am and 5pm so that I do not have to stay until 6, 7, or 8pm. I don't have a choice on this; my employer requires my physical presence in the office X days a week, and I am still figuring out how to maintain the same level of output that I achieved during WFH. "connection" is not something I seek at the office (among other things, I am in an unusual situation where 0% of my org actually works at the location I am assigned to). to be very frank, I am only there for the money, and I don't welcome distractions from that goal.
outside of work is a different story. in that context I basically agree with you, so I won't restate what you said.
I will leave you with one idea though: the concept of "peace". peace is what I feel when I walk from the metro stop to my office with my earbuds in. it is the last moment in my work day (before my commute home) when I can just exist. this is what people are disturbing with their niceties, genuinely felt or otherwise. I don't expect the entire world to conform to my way of being, I just don't agree that mine is categorically worse in the specific context of work.
And I genuinely appreciate that. Your care does shine through in those words. To me, you don’t need to say more… I don’t desire to be agreed with more than I desire peace for your life.
You’ve said you don’t seek “connection” at the office, and without knowing exactly what that means to you, I can’t assume that you’re seeking it here either. So, take this as you will:
You made me feel listened to. To me, that’s enough. Thank you.
(And yes, I’d probably put an emoji here if I could, chosen to emphasize gentleness and compassion. Likely a leaf, a sprig, or one of the non-romantic flowers. To me, this all feels so heavy without it, and lightening the words would undercut them.
Maybe a sparkle… idk. I wouldn’t normally think about it, but it seems important to say out loud, here.
When you read this, maybe you can picture a little flower, just meant to help you believe that I really do care how what I’ve said makes you feel.)
> They respond to them more quickly, they're willing to explain misconceptions, and so on. They just don't think it's because of communication style.
Dropping a follow-up comment for future data scientists:
Take a closer look at this one! Possible outlier. Check out how the root thread hasn’t really risen to the top of the list — that usually means a lot of people didn’t like the form of it, or disagreed with its self-referential opinion.
And but so also check out your sentiment scores on this thread— the grandparent is overtly a bit snide, not in a mean spirited way, but just really not agreeing with the root’s thesis that this advice leads to more productive engagement. Make sure you scored that correctly!
Then, what does your sentiment analysis have to say about the engagement here as compared to other threads? I have a prediction, obviously, and if I’m still around I’d love to read the paper :)
Yeah, I totally get that. And I absolutely knew going in that suggesting you write exactly the same thing I wrote in that exact comment couldn’t help but sound condescending.
But in complete honesty, hedging around it any more than that would have felt insincere to me. And in exchange I got sincere feedback! So really, I’m just doing things your way, and I’ve seen the benefit of it :)
With that said, for your future reference: if you hadn’t said “Interesting!” first, I wouldn’t be engaging charitably right now— I’d be debating whether to engage at all. Based on the next sentence I’m guessing you meant it more as a way to call my sincerity bluff, but I’m telling you it fucking works. Might be an idea to keep around?
To your parenthetical: One other thing to keep in mind is that those employees (I’ve been one) have to talk to terse, grumpy people all day long, and even if it’s not reciprocated, that can be a way to carve out a little moment of real human kindness. I’d keep some weight on the possibility that, sometimes, for a moment, they do just genuinely hope you have a good rest of the day.
I know there’s probably no way I can now convince you that I genuinely hope you have a good rest of the day, so, uh… take care?
I understand your point about the (theoretical) equal split between styles, so why close one or the other.
But I think you've landed on choosing your own way, when really you should try and match the vocal tone of the other person. After all the point of communicating is to get the other person receptive to your point.
And this goes both ways, I think overly perky and chipper people need to understand introverts and low-energy communicators, and match their tone as well.
Yes, this is exactly how I approach professional communication. My emails sent to different stakeholders vary wildly in style.
If you’re invested in getting something out of a conversational partner, it’s obviously best to write in a way that sounds like a thought they, themselves, could have had— in fact, are having. And contra 'ketzo’s original point, I deeply appreciate that so many we-have-to-say-mostly male tech stakeholders purposely don’t massage their language that much, and thereby make their brains that much easier to hijack.
I bring my effusively positive personality to HN largely because I don’t have any real motive or theory of change, other than possibly making it a slightly more comfortable environment for people who will read my comments precisely as written.
Oh, I’m so curious if this comment sounds more sincere to the reader :)
This is a young person who’s new to the community. That’s where communities come from!
Without other comment, this meta thread is pushing the author’s personal statement below the fold. As the grown-ass adults in the room, we can have our judgments, but we should try to make a little space, too.
I disagree with your premise of censoring as a "way to be welcoming".
There's a valid discussion to be had about the title and the need to preface things with age.
As a a grown ass adult you're not making space, you're demanding ranking that favours your ideas and even more, the silence of some you disagree with.
The funniest thing is that you didn't even address the guide itself. The style or the content, you just came to do "justice" or something.
Content is good enough. Style is a bit "full of wonder and amazement" and has its own particular flair but that's just personal style, regardless of age. You could even argue that age is necessary to account for "the audience are other high schoolers, but that's if you have the discussion you're asking people not to have (and whoever agrees with your censoring mindset and downvoted OP to now effectively hiding it from. View).
Thanks for your feedback! I’m not sure I’m following, but it’s always interesting to hear perspectives from people with different life experiences. Take care :)
Hoping I’m not too late to head off the usual confusion: this is an interesting result in philosophy of physics, not in physics.
We already know that classical mechanics is non-physical. This result (and others) show that it is not even internally consistent— that is, you shouldn’t need any empirical evidence to know that there’s something else going on.
That’s interesting to philosophers and historians, but since you and I already know empirically that it’s non-physical, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
Anyway, if you enjoyed learning about the dome, you may also look up the lesser-known “space invaders”, in which arbitrary objects can appear at infinity, with infinite velocity, and then be brought to rest at any time T. But again, don’t look for reasons that doesn’t actually happen— it means the theory is wrong.
> We already know that classical mechanics is non-physical. This result (and others) show that it is not even internally consistent— that is, you shouldn’t need any empirical evidence to know that there’s something else going on.
I don’t think this is a right approach. We already know that no theory is complete and perfect, so we can say the same thing about any theory. Even worse than that, we can make the philosophical point that any theory, being conceived within our limited brains, physically cannot be anything other than models and approximations. The logical conclusion of this argument is then that we should throw our hands in the air and stop discussing anything.
It’s also wrong in this case specifically because there is absolutely no reason why this thought experiment cannot be proven or disproven within Newtonian mechanics.
You’re welcome not to think so! I’m just pointing out the relevant context. This isn’t an argument in a vacuum, there’s an academic discipline that has thoroughly engaged with it.
Part of that is a vast body of literature that in turns agrees and disagrees with your observations— to take a side, I’d start clicking links from “theory-ladenness”.
But the dome is rather boring. P1, this math describes a deterministic system; P2, here is a non-deterministic result; QED, P1 is false.
Since we know that P1 doesn’t describe the universe, it should be hard to have a strong opinion unless you’re invested in a philosophical position about pre-modern scientific practice.
(I’m not invested, so I don’t have an opinion other than that it isn’t trivially refutable as stated.)
> You’re welcome not to think so! I’m just pointing out the relevant context.
It isn’t, though. The argument is not “lol Newtonian physics are dumb” and you’ll see nothing of the sort in the Norton argument. The argument is instead “Newtonian physics can be non-deterministic”, which is something we can demonstrate regardless of the validity range of Newtonian physics.
> This isn’t an argument in a vacuum, there’s an academic discipline that has thoroughly engaged with it.
Sure. How is that linked to your point?
> But the dome is rather boring. P1, this math describes a deterministic system; P2, here is a non-deterministic result; QED, P1 is false.
Indeed.
> Since we know that P1 doesn’t describe the universe, it should be hard to have a strong opinion unless you’re invested in a philosophical position about pre-modern scientific practice.
That’s a strange position to take from a philosophical point of view. Why things are wrong matters more than whether they are because, again, everything is wrong to some extent. So, of course in some abstract epistemological sense anything that can be formulated within Newtonian mechanics is wrong. But then nothing is right, so who cares?
The initial question is much more interesting from a philosophical point of view: does the old Newtonian mechanics, which is still the closest to our daily experience, contains seeds of non-determinism? But then the logic is flawed: the issue is not that Newtonian mechanics are wrong, it is that, in your formalism, P2 does not follow from P1 and is actually wrong.
Mmm, I promise I haven’t taken any position. Is that a position? In which case, mea culpa, I really don’t care if the dome holds. Even if I cared, I wouldn’t care, because space invaders already gets us all that plus sound effects.
Not for nothing, even historians and philosophers of physics broadly don’t care if the dome holds. Some do, of course, but unless you're thinking of a specific paper it’ll probably be less frustrating for everyone to leave it there— with no hard feelings!
> We already know that no theory is complete and perfect, so we can say the same thing about any theory.
If you mean this as an appeal to Gödel’s incompleteness results, the things those show can’t happen aren’t the same kinds of things that a “fully complete theory of physics” would have to satisfy.
That’s not to say that I expect that we will ever (in this world) have a complete description of the physics of this world,
But I’m quite confident that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems do not pose a fundamental barrier to the laws of physics of a world being perfectly known by entities in that world.
I’ll take my lumps for saying this: If you’ve downvoted me I’d love to know why!
Did I sound preachy? I really don’t mean to! I’m not an educator, and it’s hard to communicate a discipline’s “common knowledge” without coming off a bit patronizing.
It’s just, every time the dome comes up people want to talk about the physics of it— but the author isn’t a physicist, the journal isn’t for physicists, it’s not making any claims in physics…
It’s a (famous) philosophy paper, specifically philosophy of science, specifically philosophy of physics. If you aren’t a philosopher, physics is annoyingly irrelevant here.
There’s so much more to say— space invaders! It’s way weirder than this! The math still checks out! Philosophy is cool actually! Sorry to take up your time!
> this is an interesting result in philosophy of physics, not in physics.
Yes. Although it has consequences. It's a demonstration that some physical variables have to be quantized or probabilistic to avoid divide by zero errors in reality.
This becomes clear when you do idealized Newtonian physics with impulses.
An impulse is an infinite force applied over zero time with finite energy transfer. That's not something that can exist in the physical universe.
It's just asking for divide by zero problems. It's also why impulse-constraint physics engines for games have some rather strange semantics.
Indeed. Bittersweet consequences, I’ve always thought, since it implies we wasted centuries recording empirical data that didn’t add up, while pure logical coherence was pointing straight at quantization and a universal speed limit.
Modern philosophers are (obviously?) most interested in how this historical fact should affect our handling of, say, our current best model for QG. That’s a fascinating thing for lay people to ponder, which is one reason I wish the context weren’t so opaque to HN.
(I should caveat that I’m less familiar with the “history of philosophy of science” side of this— there may be a live debate as to whether this would obtain with the logic Newton himself had access to, for example.)
Thanks for that! What a fascinating set of problems.
It is interesting that all of the ones listed in that section involve either infinities or infinitesimally small points -- except for Norton's dome. Which really makes it a great example for that reason.
Yeah, exactly! You can see why the dome is the famous one, even though it’s the most recent. Previously there were models to finitize whatever term one was worried about specifically, but they all had an infinity somewhere. Even since Cantor, that makes philosophers antsy.
The dome is analogous to a loophole-free Bell test— most people already accept the conclusion, so it’s not a surprising result, but having it in one simple argument closes the door to a lot of nitpicking.
What accounts for the smooth “settling” into place after the last touch around 10s?
I have no idea what I’m talking about, but in other flux pinning demonstrations the sample seems to oscillate around the fixed point. That smooth settling looks like some sort of damping, like maybe a force that increases with distance, like maybe spring tension.
(Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)
Air resistance seems like a reasonable explanation for the dampening. Furthermore if it's not pure and only partially superconducting, the dampening could be due to magnetic fields forming eddy currents in the sample.
> (Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)
Good hypotheses both! “We’ve never been able to pin something this size before” covers a lot of wiggle room. So to speak.
(FWIW I’m thrilled about the possibility of a rtrp drop this year, and I have to assume 'pera is as well. But this video doesn’t look just like flux pinning we’ve seen before. It’s visibly a little different in a way that wants explanation. I wouldn’t come out the gate calling it a hoax, but I’d feel better about not doing that if the basis for skepticism were at least acknowledged.)
As a general statement, no, vision isn’t as time-sensitive as hearing, so the timing requirements aren’t as precise. But when it comes to head and hand tracking, the brain’s also doing predictive sensor fusion, and even “unnoticeably” small delays can be disorienting or nauseating. (Ocular fixation is the most sensitive, but hand-eye coordination is also pretty important to the brain!)
The important number in VR is “motion-to-photon” latency. Over 20ms starts to be noticeable to most people; 50ms starts to make most people uncomfortable. That’s the total budget for sensor fusion, simulation, rendering, and display, and that’s just for the bare-minimum experience that doesn’t make people immediately ill.
You can do a lot with prediction and late updates in screen space, which is what makes VR possible at all on current hardware— but it’s hard to make up for having sensor data delayed by possibly 150% of the total time budget :)