This is an odd thing to do, because :

- information is real, it exists in the universe.

- the harm of social media is real, as measured by many of the same measures as the harm of smoking

Why not do something about ads? No, that's a good thought, we should do that too.

I think a decent conceptualization here is "psychic damage", as in a video game. These things deal a lot of it.

I find this line of thinking to lead to the conclusion that the moral status of humans derives from our bodies, and in particular from our bodies mirroring others' emotions and pains. Other people suffering is wrong because I empathically can feel it too.

If insurance companies then can wiggle out of covering pre-existing conditions, they're no longer solving the moral problem they were brought into the world to solve, and now we need some other solution to solve the rest of it. Then, whatever that other solution is, it's solving the hard part, so why not extend it to solve the whole thing and cut the insurance middlemen out of the economy entirely? What are they even doing at that point besides extracting a rent?

(This is one answer among many good ones to what is really a bad-faith question—health-insurance is not a lot like fire-insurance at all)

That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mean higher profits, not lower prices, and again--good for them!

A fantastic amount of collective human thought has been dedicated to function approximations in the last century; Taylor methods are over 200 years old and unlikely to come close to state-of-the-art.

Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.

Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.

It's helpful sometimes to think of our collective body of mathematical knowledge as like a "codebase", and our notations and concepts as the "interface" to the abstractions at play within. Any software engineer would immediately acknowledge that some interfaces are FAR better than others.

The complex numbers numbers are one interface to the thing they model, and as you say, in a certain sense, it may be the case that the thing is C. But other interfaces exist: 2x2 antisymmetric traceless matrices, or a certain bivector in the geometric-algebra sense.

Different interfaces: a) suggest different extensions, b) interface with other abstractions more or less naturally, c) lend themselves to different physical interpretations d) compress the "real" information of the abstraction to different degrees.

An example of (a): when we first learn about electric and magnetic fields we treat them both as the "same kind of thing"—vector fields—only to later find they are not (B is better thought of as bivector field, or better still, both are certain components of dA). The first hint is their different properties under reflections and rotations. "E and B are both vector fields" is certainly an abstraction you CAN use, but it is poorly-matched to the underlying abstraction and winds up with a bunch of extra epicycles.

Of (d): you could of course write all of quantum mechanics with `i` replaced by a 2x2 rotation matrix. (This might be "matrix mechanics", I'm not sure?) This gives you many more d.o.f. than you need, and a SWE-minded person would come in and say: ah, see, you should make invalid states unrepresentable. Here, use this: `i = (0 -1; 1 0)`. An improvement!

Of (b): the Pauli matrices, used for spin-1/2 two-state systems, represent the quaternions. Yet here we don't limit ourselves to `{1, i, j, k}`; we prefer a 2-state representation—why? Because (IIRC) the 2 states emerge intuitively from the physical problems which lead to 2-state systems; because the 2 states mix in other reference frames; things like that (I can't really remember). Who's to say something similar doesn't happen with the 2 states of the phase `i`, but that it's obscured by our abstraction? (Probably it isn't, but, prove it!)

I have not given it much more thought than this, but, I find that this line of thinking places the "discontent with the complex numbers in physics" a number of people in this thread attest to in a productive light. That dissatisfaction is with the interface of the abstraction: why? Where was the friction? In what way does it feel unnecessarily mystifying, or unparsimonious?

Of course, the hope is that something physical is obscured by the abstraction: that we learn something new by viewing the problem in another frame, and might realize, say, that the interface we supposed to be universally applicable actually ceases to work in some interesting case, and turns out to explain something new.