4 ms·
It does seem to me that you are conflating lack of evidence with non-existence though. We haven't measured an effect but that doesn't mean that we can't reason
by verve_rat 4y ago
It does seem to me that you are conflating lack of evidence with non-existence though.
We haven't measured an effect but that doesn't mean that we can't reason about this in other ways. The lived experience of people that do this thing for a living can be an important resource. You could argue that we are getting in to soft social science here, but is there value in what the collective of trades people think about their tools?
We didn't know the science behind steal for a long time, but we still figured out how to make it and that it holds an edge really well.
Empirical measurement is not the only way to discover value.
- therealdrag0 4y agoFwiw a similar pattern is seen in cooking, where lots of chefs have reasoned ideas of how things work based on tradition and lived hands on experience, yet are scientifically disproven. Lived experience works to some extent, eliminating failures and making progress, like with your steal example, but that doesn’t mean it can pick optimal options from a list of options that all work to some reasonable extent; aka dynamic typing does also build software.