I really appreciate the concept and the name: rounding as lowering precision in a controlled, predictable way; simplification in the sense of moving up in some hierarchy of refinements. Like rounding, it is sometimes desirable (to simplify or to compare distant objects), and sometimes necessary (e.g. when you have a detailed best guess with a lot of uncertainty; 12.527g ±1g might actually be your scale’s best guess but the information is still mostly misleading).
I also did the exercise of distinguishing this from bucket errors and fallacies of compression—highly recommend it!
I am not as familiar with the concept of Fallacy of compression but I understand it primarily applies in situations when you did not even realize there might be two concepts, e.g. because you have no tools to distinguish them (conceptually or scientifically). For me it also somehow associates with compression artifacts, i.e. compressing an object unevenly or novel undesirable structure appearing due to the compression (e.g. JPEG or video artifacts), but that does not seem to be the intended definition. :::
I really appreciate the concept and the name: rounding as lowering precision in a controlled, predictable way; simplification in the sense of moving up in some hierarchy of refinements. Like rounding, it is sometimes desirable (to simplify or to compare distant objects), and sometimes necessary (e.g. when you have a detailed best guess with a lot of uncertainty; 12.527g ±1g might actually be your scale’s best guess but the information is still mostly misleading).
I also did the exercise of distinguishing this from bucket errors and fallacies of compression—highly recommend it!
I am not as familiar with the concept of Fallacy of compression but I understand it primarily applies in situations when you did not even realize there might be two concepts, e.g. because you have no tools to distinguish them (conceptually or scientifically). For me it also somehow associates with compression artifacts, i.e. compressing an object unevenly or novel undesirable structure appearing due to the compression (e.g. JPEG or video artifacts), but that does not seem to be the intended definition. :::