Comment by tunesmith
4 years ago
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.
> 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.
> 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 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?
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.
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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.
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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.
That's just one kind of paradox in one domain (say, logic). There are well known named paradoxes of several different types, belonging to several different domains...
The reverse may also be true: that the "preparedness" truly was unnecessary. No one will ever know.
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.
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.
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>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...
It seems that tunesmith has stumbled upon the paradox paradox.
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…