I’m currently working on a text document full of equations that use variables with extremely long names. I’m in the process of simplifying it by renaming the variables. For complicated reasons, I have to do this by hand.
Just now, I noticed that there’s a series of variables O1-O16, and another series of variables F17-F25. For technical reasons relating to the work I’m doing, I’m very confident that the name switch is arbitrary and that I can safely rename the F’s to O’s without changing the meaning of the equations.
But I’m doing this by hand. If I’m wrong, I will potentially was a lot of work by (1) making this change (2) making a bunch of other changes (3) realizing I was wrong (4) undoing all the other changes (5) undoing this change (6) re-doing all the changes that came after it.
And for a moment, this spurred me to become less confident about the arbitrariness of the naming convention!
The correct thought would have been “I’m quite confident about this, but seeing as the stakes are high if I’m wrong and I can always do this later, it’s still not worth it to make the changes now.”
The problem here was that I was conflating “X is very likely true” with “I must do the thing I would do if X was certain”. I knew instinctively that making the changes now was a bad idea, and then I incorrectly reasoned that it was because it was likely to go wrong. It’s actually unlikely to go wrong, it’s just that if it does go wrong, it’s a huge inconvenience.
I just caught myself committing a bucket error.
I’m currently working on a text document full of equations that use variables with extremely long names. I’m in the process of simplifying it by renaming the variables. For complicated reasons, I have to do this by hand.
Just now, I noticed that there’s a series of variables O1-O16, and another series of variables F17-F25. For technical reasons relating to the work I’m doing, I’m very confident that the name switch is arbitrary and that I can safely rename the F’s to O’s without changing the meaning of the equations.
But I’m doing this by hand. If I’m wrong, I will potentially was a lot of work by (1) making this change (2) making a bunch of other changes (3) realizing I was wrong (4) undoing all the other changes (5) undoing this change (6) re-doing all the changes that came after it.
And for a moment, this spurred me to become less confident about the arbitrariness of the naming convention!
The correct thought would have been “I’m quite confident about this, but seeing as the stakes are high if I’m wrong and I can always do this later, it’s still not worth it to make the changes now.”
The problem here was that I was conflating “X is very likely true” with “I must do the thing I would do if X was certain”. I knew instinctively that making the changes now was a bad idea, and then I incorrectly reasoned that it was because it was likely to go wrong. It’s actually unlikely to go wrong, it’s just that if it does go wrong, it’s a huge inconvenience.
Whoops.