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I don't understand why it's called a paradox. It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. Getting better at systems thinking is a great way t

I don't understand why it's called a paradox. It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. Getting better at systems thinking is a great way to get better at avoiding this. At work I've learned to point out "we wouldn't need to spend time on this if we invested the time to implement X", so the product folks are more aware of the counterfactuals when it comes time to justify the investment.

meken 4y ago
Agreed, I think it should only be called a paradox if it met the pattern “the more effort you spend on preparedness, the less prepared you become…” Otherwise it just seems like a relationship between two variables…
Jtsummers 4y ago
> It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. You've just described most paradoxes. From the definition of "paradox": > a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.
- tunesmith 4y ago
  How odd, I've never come across that definition of paradox. I've always understood it to be purely self-contradictory, like: This sentence is false. If I take it to be false, it's true; if I take it to be true, it's false. The proper understanding is that it actually has no semantic meaning, but it certainly doesn't prove to be well-founded or true. Using "paradox" for something like this concept though is along the lines of also using it for the phenomenon of people appearing to vote against their self-interest. They keep doing it, we don't understand why - it might be that they're stupid, it might be that we don't understand enough of their perspective, but it just doesn't strike me as a paradox. Not unless every phenomenon we don't understand is also a paradox. Are software bugs paradoxes?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Yeah, this is something that has always bugged be a tiny bit. I was more familiar with the idea of a paradox as something like your definition -- containing an actual contradiction. But it seems to be used instead to describe any initially counterintuitive situation. It is tempting to attribute this to a technical/non-technical difference (similar to fallacy, which in non-technical discussion has been expanded to basically include almost any bad argument). But somehow the Birthday "Paradox" has managed to stick in probability.
    - omnicognate 4y ago
      Paradox isn't synonymous with contradiction. Some paradoxes are, or contain, logical contradictions (i.e. they effectively say both X and not X are true) but the term is much broader. Some of the earliest paradoxes are Zeno's, and they were referred to by that term at the time. For example the paradox that an object that moves towards a point must first cover half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, then half of the remainder, etc. Since this is an infinite number of steps, Zeno playfully argued that motion is impossible. There's no logical contradiction there, just a way of pointing out something counterintuitive about reality and maths.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        That's fair, the thing I'm looking for isn't quite a contradiction. What I like about Zeno's motion based paradoxes is they have this aspect of "here's a reasonable model of motion, and here's the ridiculous result you get from it." There's clearly something wrong in the model, but working it out takes a while, you need someone to come around and invent series first. After a little reading, I think I just like falsidical paradoxes and don't like veridical paradoxes.
    - vapemaster 4y ago
      i always heard it called the birthday problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem [weirdly, someone discovered an birthday overlap today at work and i just re-google/wiki'd this today]
pbreit 4y ago
The reverse may also be true: that the "preparedness" truly was unnecessary. No one will ever know.
- tunesmith 4y ago
  I guess that gets me closer to understanding it, thanks. If we consider an example where the potential outcome is truly unknowable. If we don't prepare, it might happen; if we do, it might not have ever happened. So in that sense, the Y2K bug isn't a good example, but perhaps preparing for catastrophic low-probability events like "AI paper-clip doom" is.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    I saw this playing out in the California Super-storm stories that went out late last week. Some of the headlines made it sound like a mega storm that would bring 10 feet of rain was just off shore. Only reading the article led to to the possibility that such a storm could happen sometime in the next 50-500 years. No real indication of what anyone should DO with such information.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      >No real indication of what anyone should DO with such information. Do you build infrastructure? If no, the fact that 10 feet of rain can fall is mostly useless, unless you're buying a house downstream of a dam to keep in the family. The situation is widely reported because it's a great fear based headline and gets the clicks. With that said, it's something every civil engineer that could build a project in CA should know about, because their decisions now could lead to the death of a very large number of people at some point in the future. That marginal wetland that could be reclaimed for housing shouldn't be, unless you like the news that comes out of Houston every once in a while.
pdonis 4y ago
> It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. That's one issue, but another issue is how accurately we can estimate the counterfactual outcomes. In the case you described, where some up-front investment can reduce costs later on, the accuracy of the estimate of the counterfactual is usually fairly good. But when we talk about society-wide or planet-wide outcomes, our accuracy is much worse. Even in many cases where it seems fairly obvious that an up front intervention mitigated significant harm, we really don't know that with a very high level of confidence. There are just too many uncontrolled and unmeasured variables.
coldtea 4y ago
>I don't understand why it's called a paradox. It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. So? Most paradoxes can be described as "people having trouble understanding X". The Liar's paradox is "people having trouble understanding meta-statements" (at least according to Russel's theory). Zeno's Ahilles paradox is people not understanding convergent infinite series's. The Potato paradox is people not understanding algebra. The Friendship paradox is people not understanding statistics. And so on...
- zen_of_prog 4y ago
  It seems that tunesmith has stumbled upon the paradox paradox.

meken 4y ago

Agreed, I think it should only be called a paradox if it met the pattern “the more effort you spend on preparedness, the less prepared you become…” Otherwise it just seems like a relationship between two variables…

Jtsummers 4y ago

> It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. You've just described most paradoxes. From the definition of "paradox": > a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.

tunesmith 4y ago
How odd, I've never come across that definition of paradox. I've always understood it to be purely self-contradictory, like: This sentence is false. If I take it to be false, it's true; if I take it to be true, it's false. The proper understanding is that it actually has no semantic meaning, but it certainly doesn't prove to be well-founded or true. Using "paradox" for something like this concept though is along the lines of also using it for the phenomenon of people appearing to vote against their self-interest. They keep doing it, we don't understand why - it might be that they're stupid, it might be that we don't understand enough of their perspective, but it just doesn't strike me as a paradox. Not unless every phenomenon we don't understand is also a paradox. Are software bugs paradoxes?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Yeah, this is something that has always bugged be a tiny bit. I was more familiar with the idea of a paradox as something like your definition -- containing an actual contradiction. But it seems to be used instead to describe any initially counterintuitive situation. It is tempting to attribute this to a technical/non-technical difference (similar to fallacy, which in non-technical discussion has been expanded to basically include almost any bad argument). But somehow the Birthday "Paradox" has managed to stick in probability.
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    Paradox isn't synonymous with contradiction. Some paradoxes are, or contain, logical contradictions (i.e. they effectively say both X and not X are true) but the term is much broader. Some of the earliest paradoxes are Zeno's, and they were referred to by that term at the time. For example the paradox that an object that moves towards a point must first cover half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, then half of the remainder, etc. Since this is an infinite number of steps, Zeno playfully argued that motion is impossible. There's no logical contradiction there, just a way of pointing out something counterintuitive about reality and maths.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      That's fair, the thing I'm looking for isn't quite a contradiction. What I like about Zeno's motion based paradoxes is they have this aspect of "here's a reasonable model of motion, and here's the ridiculous result you get from it." There's clearly something wrong in the model, but working it out takes a while, you need someone to come around and invent series first. After a little reading, I think I just like falsidical paradoxes and don't like veridical paradoxes.
  - vapemaster 4y ago
    i always heard it called the birthday problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem [weirdly, someone discovered an birthday overlap today at work and i just re-google/wiki'd this today]

pbreit 4y ago

The reverse may also be true: that the "preparedness" truly was unnecessary. No one will ever know.

tunesmith 4y ago
I guess that gets me closer to understanding it, thanks. If we consider an example where the potential outcome is truly unknowable. If we don't prepare, it might happen; if we do, it might not have ever happened. So in that sense, the Y2K bug isn't a good example, but perhaps preparing for catastrophic low-probability events like "AI paper-clip doom" is.
- brewdad 4y ago
  I saw this playing out in the California Super-storm stories that went out late last week. Some of the headlines made it sound like a mega storm that would bring 10 feet of rain was just off shore. Only reading the article led to to the possibility that such a storm could happen sometime in the next 50-500 years. No real indication of what anyone should DO with such information.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >No real indication of what anyone should DO with such information. Do you build infrastructure? If no, the fact that 10 feet of rain can fall is mostly useless, unless you're buying a house downstream of a dam to keep in the family. The situation is widely reported because it's a great fear based headline and gets the clicks. With that said, it's something every civil engineer that could build a project in CA should know about, because their decisions now could lead to the death of a very large number of people at some point in the future. That marginal wetland that could be reclaimed for housing shouldn't be, unless you like the news that comes out of Houston every once in a while.

pdonis 4y ago

> It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. That's one issue, but another issue is how accurately we can estimate the counterfactual outcomes. In the case you described, where some up-front investment can reduce costs later on, the accuracy of the estimate of the counterfactual is usually fairly good. But when we talk about society-wide or planet-wide outcomes, our accuracy is much worse. Even in many cases where it seems fairly obvious that an up front intervention mitigated significant harm, we really don't know that with a very high level of confidence. There are just too many uncontrolled and unmeasured variables.

coldtea 4y ago

>I don't understand why it's called a paradox. It's just people having trouble understanding counterfactuals. So? Most paradoxes can be described as "people having trouble understanding X". The Liar's paradox is "people having trouble understanding meta-statements" (at least according to Russel's theory). Zeno's Ahilles paradox is people not understanding convergent infinite series's. The Potato paradox is people not understanding algebra. The Friendship paradox is people not understanding statistics. And so on...

zen_of_prog 4y ago
It seems that tunesmith has stumbled upon the paradox paradox.