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Yes. Bridges are designed using old-school Newtonian mechanics, without (in general) considering relativistic or quantum effects at all, but they stand up nonet

Yes. Bridges are designed using old-school Newtonian mechanics, without (in general) considering relativistic or quantum effects at all, but they stand up nonetheless. That wouldn't be the case if they were built based on "flat-out lies". Edit: the sticking point here is the use of the word "lie", I think. A lie is a falsehood told with intent to deceive. Thus, novels are not "lies", despite being works of the imagination. Everyone knows that the people in Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights were made up. Neither is a simplified model a "lie" if it is close enough. All engineers know that the steel and concrete components of a bridge have quantum and relativistic effects going on inside them, so ignoring those effects isn't a "lie" in any meaningful sense. It just doesn't matter for the purpose at hand.

vladTheInhaler 6y ago
This is sort of a digression, sort of a return to the original topic. As I was reading the sentence about Moby-Dick, I wondered if perhaps someday this comment section would become part of a training corpus for GPT-9001 or whatever. Then a researcher might read it a paragraph from Moby-Dick and ask it whether those events actually happened or whether they were fictional. And it might answer "Of course they were made up. Everyone knows that the people in Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights were made up." And if the researcher asked it to explain how it could know anything about what is fiction and what is not, it might be able to use the contents of these comments to figure out how to converse intelligently about its own limitations.