https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options
This is an essay about one of those "once you see it, you will see it everywhere" phenomena. It is a psychological and interpersonal dynamic roughly as common, and almost as destructive, as motte-and-bailey, and at least in my own personal experience it's been quite valuable to have it reified, so that I can quickly recognize the commonality between what I had previously thought of as completely unrelated situations.
The original quote referenced in the title is "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Background 1: Gyroscopes
Gyroscopes are weird.
Except they're not. They're quite normal and mundane and straightforward. The weirdness of gyroscopes is a map-territory confusion—gyroscopes seem weird because my map is poorly made, and predicts that they will do something other than their normal, mundane, straightforward thing.
In large part, this is because I don't have the consequences of physical law engraved deeply enough into my soul that they make intuitive sense.
I can imagine a world that looks exactly like the world around me, in every way, except that in this imagined world, gyroscopes don't have any of their strange black-magic properties. It feels coherent to me. It feels like a world that could possibly exist.
"Everything's the same, except gyroscopes do nothing special." Sure, why not.
But in fact, this world is deeply, deeply incoherent. It is Not Possible with capital letters. And a physicist with sufficiently sharp intuitions would know this—would be able to see the implications of a world where gyroscopes "don't do anything weird," and tell me all of the ways in which reality falls apart.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options
This is an essay about one of those "once you see it, you will see it everywhere" phenomena. It is a psychological and interpersonal dynamic roughly as common, and almost as destructive, as motte-and-bailey, and at least in my own personal experience it's been quite valuable to have it reified, so that I can quickly recognize the commonality between what I had previously thought of as completely unrelated situations.
The original quote referenced in the title is "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Background 1: Gyroscopes
Gyroscopes are weird.
Except they're not. They're quite normal and mundane and straightforward. The weirdness of gyroscopes is a map-territory confusion—gyroscopes seem weird because my map is poorly made, and predicts that they will do something other than their normal, mundane, straightforward thing.
In large part, this is because I don't have the consequences of physical law engraved deeply enough into my soul that they make intuitive sense.
I can imagine a world that looks exactly like the world around me, in every way, except that in this imagined world, gyroscopes don't have any of their strange black-magic properties. It feels coherent to me. It feels like a world that could possibly exist.
"Everything's the same, except gyroscopes do nothing special." Sure, why not.
But in fact, this world is deeply, deeply incoherent. It is Not Possible with capital letters. And a physicist with sufficiently sharp intuitions would know this—would be able to see the implications of a world where gyroscopes "don't do anything weird," and tell me all of the ways in which reality falls apart.