Why it feels like everything is a trade-off
Epistemic status: A cute insight that explains why it might feel like you always have to make sacrifices along one metric to get improvements along another. Seems tautological once you understand it. Might be obvious to everyone. Meta-epistemic status or something: My first post. Testing the waters. Tl;dr: Skip to the last paragraph. Example of a trade-off I'm a programmer. I'm also a design prude. I'm also lazy. This all means that I spend a lot of my time chasing some different metrics in my code: 1) How easy it is to read. 2) How long it takes to run. 3) How long it takes to write. 4) ... These metrics are often at odds with one another. Just the other day I had to make a trade-off involving a function I'd written to evaluate a polynomial at a given point. Originally, it was written in a way that I felt was self-explanatory: it looped over the derivatives-at-zero of the polynomial, which were passed in as a list, and summed up the appropriate multiples of powers of x — a Taylor sum. Pseudo-code: def apply_polynomial( deriv, x ): sum = 0 for i from 0 to length( deriv ): sum += deriv[i] * pow(x, i) / factorial(i) return sum It turned out that this function was a significant bottleneck in the execution time of my program: about 20% of it was spent inside this function. I was reasonably sure that the pow and factorial functions were the issue. I also knew that this function would only ever be called with cubics and lower-degree polynomials. So I re-wrote the code as follows: def apply_cubic( deriv, x ): sum = 0 len = length( deriv ) if len > 0: sum += deriv[0] if len > 1: sum += deriv[1] * x if len > 2: square = x * x sum += deriv[2] * square / 2 if len > 3: cube = square * x sum += deriv[3] * cube / 6 return sum Sure enough, this improved the runtime significantly — by nearly the whole 20%
Right. The 100 arguments the person gives aren't 100 parallel arguments in favor of them having good reasons to believe evolution is false, for exactly the reason you give. So my reasoning doesn't stop you from concluding that they have no good reason to disbelieve.
And, they are still 100 arguments in parallel that evolution is false, and my reasoning in the post correctly implies that you can't read five of them, see that they aren't good arguments, and conclude that evolution is true. (That conclusion requires a good argument in favor of evolution, not a bad one against it.)