Nice post! I think though that there is an important class of exceptions to scope matching, which I'll refer to as "well-engineered systems". Think of for example the "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" described in the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem where all of the parts are designed to have exactly the same rate of failure. Real world systems can only approach that ideal, but they can get close enough that their most frequent error modes would fail the scope matching heuristic.
I bring this up in particular because I think that crime rates might ... (read more)
I enjoyed that poem, thanks for the recommendation! However, I found some of the
old English really hard to understand. To anyone who shares that predicament, I
found a great spoken version of the poem on Youtube
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiOHhhwnK6k], which e.g. makes it clear that
the "one-hoss shay" is something like a one-horse carriage.
2jasoncrawford3mo
Thanks. Yes this is a good point, and related to @cousin_it
[https://www.lesswrong.com/users/cousin_it?mention=user]'s point. Had not heard
of this poem, nice reference.
7DirectedEvolution3mo
Just a quick friendly critique - in the poem, the shay’s parts are meant to fail
simultaneously, not at the same rate. Keep that in mind for accurate
interpretation!
Nice post! I think though that there is an important class of exceptions to scope matching, which I'll refer to as "well-engineered systems". Think of for example the "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" described in the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem where all of the parts are designed to have exactly the same rate of failure. Real world systems can only approach that ideal, but they can get close enough that their most frequent error modes would fail the scope matching heuristic.
I bring this up in particular because I think that crime rates might ... (read more)