“Never try to deceive yourself, or offer a reason to believe other than probable truth; because even if you come up with an amazing clever reason, it’s more likely that you’ve made a mistake than that you have a reasonable expectation of this being a net benefit in the long run.”
I’ll offer a reason to believe. The truth costs. Take pi, the most probable truth is that pi is equal to the limit of the Perimeter of an n sided polygon divided by its diameter as n goes to infinity.
pi = 3.14159000000 is not the truth or even a probable truth, but will do in a pinch when the answer doesn’t matter too much. People doing rough estimates for amount of material or liquid they might need have got away with the approximation given by a pocket calculator or excel. Making every pocket calculator use infinite precision math, would be very expensive....
You might get bitten by black swans if you use an approximation, only use them in the case where the cost of using the truth outways the likely cost of getting a black swan bite.
Amen.
I’ll offer a reason to believe. The truth costs. Take pi, the most probable truth is that pi is equal to the limit of the Perimeter of an n sided polygon divided by its diameter as n goes to infinity.
pi = 3.14159000000 is not the truth or even a probable truth, but will do in a pinch when the answer doesn’t matter too much. People doing rough estimates for amount of material or liquid they might need have got away with the approximation given by a pocket calculator or excel. Making every pocket calculator use infinite precision math, would be very expensive....
You might get bitten by black swans if you use an approximation, only use them in the case where the cost of using the truth outways the likely cost of getting a black swan bite.