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I never understood why the joke is on the drunk guy in this metaphor. If you dropped your keys and they're either under the lamppost or fallen down the drain,
by dmurray 1y ago
I never understood why the joke is on the drunk guy in this metaphor.
If you dropped your keys and they're either under the lamppost or fallen down the drain, you should start by looking under the lamppost even if you think it's more likely they're in the drain.
If you're debugging something and the problem is either in the nice easy documented, logged, instrumented system or in a more intractable one, you should look in the easy one first. If you're right, you'll solve it quicker, if you're wrong, less time wasted.
- chrisweekly 1y agoFWIW, the classic metaphor implies the keys could be almost anywhere (not just either under the lamppost or down a nearby drain).
- rcxdude 1y agoThe original joke implies the keys are almost certainly not under the lamp-post (the drunk dropped them some way down the street)
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoBut that's not the metaphor. You've added a constraint to it. The metaphor concerns bias and the error it presupposes and the fallacious conclusions it produces. "Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice." [0] Physicists who conclude that only the quantifiable exists are the paradigmatic example. Their methods select for the quantifiable, so how could they find anything else using them? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect