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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 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.
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.
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> 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.
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomy
Yes, all antinomies are paradoxes but not all paradoxes are antinomies.
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Then why South Korea and Italy didn't suffer Y2K problems. And invested little to nothing in Y2K remediation.
Y2k wasn't a hoax but it was exploited and hyped. There was definitely the possibility of really bad impacts on critical infrastructure. If we had all behaved like Italy then I think it could have been quite bad. The majority of y2k work I saw on the ground was companies using it as an excuse to upgrade all their kit. I did some assessments and was asked more than once to emphasise the risk a bit more.
This also manifests in for instance how we treat testing in software engineering. Folks don't get as much credit for writing tests because it's impossible to count the set of SEVs that didn't happen. On the other hand, you get outsized credit for the heroics of fixing them.
Also, ask an engineer whether tests are complete, and he’ll always tell you that we haven’t tested anything yet. You need a cutoff at one point.
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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…
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 bas…
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.
I’m almost positive there will be some amount of blowback when the thing releases and there are no stability or security problems…which was only because I made sure we spent the necessary time on them.
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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…
Your notion of paradox is more precisely known as an antinomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomy Yes, all antinomies are paradoxes but not all paradoxes are antinomies.
Not doubting this, but it seems to cut both ways. I can just as easily justify an overreaction by claiming to have averted some worse outcome. It seems to be a general problem of counterfactuals.
One might think that constant firefighting is a waste of resources, and we'd be better off solving problems before they happen. That's true if and only if you know for sure that the problem and eventual breakage is really going to happen AND that it's worth fixing. At least in my experience, it's more often true that people overestimate the risk of calamity and waste resources fixing things that aren't actually going to break catastrophically. Or fix things that we don't actually need, but only figure out that we don't need them when they finally break and we realize that the cost of fixing or replacing it outweighs whatever value it was providing.
The engineer in me hates saying this, but sometimes things don't have to be beautifully designed and perfectly built to handle the worst. Duct tape and superglue often really is good enough.
Of course, this doesn't apply to problems that are truly existential risks. If the potential systemic breakage is so bad that it irreparably collapses the system, then active preparedness can certainly be justified.