Your passion and dedication warmed my heart, though the reality really cooled my blood.
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible”
No.
The snowballs and even the drifts feel no more accountable than the flakes do.
Winry Rockbell
Karma: 7
It is written in More Dakka:
If something is a good idea, you need a reason to not try doing more of it.
Taken at face value, it implies the following:
If something is a bad idea, you need a reason to not try doing less of it.
I like this post, but the logic here troubles me a bit. Let me lay out why I think the implication might be invalid and the original statement is also a little questionable.
If we formalize it:
A = “something is a good idea”
B = “you need a reason to not try doing more of it”
The original post asserts [A ⇒ B]. But a true implication only guarantees its contrapositive, [¬B ⇒ ¬A] , not the inverse the post jumps to. So let’s unpack the contrapositive:
¬B = “you don’t need a reason to not try doing more of it” ≈ “you can be unapologetically unmotivated to do it” (this step is a bit of a stretch, but roughly close)
¬A = “something is not a good idea”
So the face-value implication should really be:
If you find yourself unapologetically unmotivated to do something, then that thing is not a good idea.
Examining this contrapositive makes it easier to see that the original statement smuggles in a huge assumption about how aware a person is of their own preferences and situation, because counterexamples to the contrapositive are easy to find. Behavioral economics suggests people are pretty irrational: they’re often unapologetically unmotivated to do things that would clearly benefit them, especially under conditions like imperfect-information games (e.g., people under-using a free preventive health resource).
So after thinking it through, I honestly believe the original [A ⇒ B] statement can only hold for a perfectly honed rationalist, so aspirationally it’s true ;).
Anyhow, my point is the original statement isn’t responsible for the implication this post draws from it.
, “The purpose of the screwdriver is to drive screws”—as though this were an explicit property of the screwdriver itself, rather than a property of the designer’s state of mind.
This reminds me of the “affordance theory” . An object can afford to do varies of activities that its designer did not design it to do. Like screwdriver can afford to be used as a kitchen tool to open coconuts.
The existence of Kim’s regime in North Korea reminds me of this point everyday.