Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude frequencies but I'll try.
It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for granted.
You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets closer to perfection, identifying imperfections and rectifying them is harder simply out of search constraints (the less of something the harder they are to find).
Another model you could have is the "dimensional model". A thing is great when it's great along many axes. The more dimensions you add, the harder it is to search in them for perfection. Related: the curse of dimensionality.
And here he posits a new model, the "resolution model": the finer the look at what is good, the more 'options' you have at each stage to choose from; it's not just that you make the broad and then refine within, but that you are actually building the refined thing from the beginning.
He then tries to show how some kinds of creation tolerate movement in the parameter space better.
No model is perfect, so each of these ideas captures some attribute of the difficulty and maps it to a mental structure that is more easily manipulable by the modeler.
The typical owl drawing is a few circles and then the more owly bits, and then the feathers on the owly bits, and then the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits. And this is a method to reduce the kind of problem he's talking about. But if you want to make the perfect owl, perhaps there is an element of making your circle just so, already accounting for the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits before any of the precursors are made.
Anyway, this is imperfect because I am necessarily shaving off the hair on the ball to show you it's spherical. And his entire model is that the hair determines the ball.
The problem, perhaps, is that it is rare to have the kind of greatness that conceives of a concept and serializes it to text and image in such a way that anyone could deserialize it and approach a semblance of the concept in the mind that conceived it. Perhaps many of us find ideas in ideaspace and many of us can transmit ideaspace shapes to the universal others losslessly but the intersection of the two is very small.
So we must live in the world where those of us who discover a point in ideaspace draw imperfect maps until the one who can draw a good map arrives at the same point. And perhaps some points aren't even well-mappable by the discoverers. And perhaps the communicator never realizes he has arrived at the point he was told about and so never speaks of it.
We fumble in the dark desert for an oasis. Unlucky universe to be in.
Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude frequencies but I'll try.
It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for granted.
You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets closer to perfection, identifying imperfections and rectifying them is harder simply out of search constraints (the less of something the harder they are to find).
Another model you could have is the "dimensional model". A thing is great when it's great along many axes. The more dimensions you add, the harder it is to search in them for perfection. Related: the curse of dimensionality.
And here he posits a new model, the "resolution model": the finer the look at what is good, the more 'options' you have at each stage to choose from; it's not just that you make the broad and then refine within, but that you are actually building the refined thing from the beginning.
He then tries to show how some kinds of creation tolerate movement in the parameter space better.
No model is perfect, so each of these ideas captures some attribute of the difficulty and maps it to a mental structure that is more easily manipulable by the modeler.
The typical owl drawing is a few circles and then the more owly bits, and then the feathers on the owly bits, and then the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits. And this is a method to reduce the kind of problem he's talking about. But if you want to make the perfect owl, perhaps there is an element of making your circle just so, already accounting for the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits before any of the precursors are made.
Anyway, this is imperfect because I am necessarily shaving off the hair on the ball to show you it's spherical. And his entire model is that the hair determines the ball.