To clarify, my position is that whether someone finds an abstract measure to be “fake” or not depends on how comfortable they are with abstractions. Some abstractions wear very concrete disguises, and people are generally fine with these.
My experience is that people’s folk-physics interpretation of their centre of mass is that it’s an actual part of their body that the rest of their body moves around. A lot of dancers, for example, will talk about their “core”, their “centre” and their “centre of gravity” as interchangeable concepts. When confronted with the idea that it’s an abstraction which can be located outside of their body, they’re often forced to concede that this intangible thing is nonetheless an important and useful concept. If that’s true of centre of mass, maybe they should think a little bit harder about market equilibria or standard deviation.
As Dan pointed out here cousin_it’s definition of “fake number” has a very concrete meaning. The most your example shows is that the folk-physics notion “center of gravity” as opposed to the actual physics notion is a fake number.
While his definition of “true number” is fairly concrete, his definition of “fake number” is less so, and importantly is not disjoint with “true number”.
ETA: Having thought about it a bit and looked over it, I’m fairly sure we’re just talking past each other and there’s no coherent point of dispute in this discussion. I suggest we stop having it.
To clarify, my position is that whether someone finds an abstract measure to be “fake” or not depends on how comfortable they are with abstractions. Some abstractions wear very concrete disguises, and people are generally fine with these.
My experience is that people’s folk-physics interpretation of their centre of mass is that it’s an actual part of their body that the rest of their body moves around. A lot of dancers, for example, will talk about their “core”, their “centre” and their “centre of gravity” as interchangeable concepts. When confronted with the idea that it’s an abstraction which can be located outside of their body, they’re often forced to concede that this intangible thing is nonetheless an important and useful concept. If that’s true of centre of mass, maybe they should think a little bit harder about market equilibria or standard deviation.
As Dan pointed out here cousin_it’s definition of “fake number” has a very concrete meaning. The most your example shows is that the folk-physics notion “center of gravity” as opposed to the actual physics notion is a fake number.
While his definition of “true number” is fairly concrete, his definition of “fake number” is less so, and importantly is not disjoint with “true number”.
ETA: Having thought about it a bit and looked over it, I’m fairly sure we’re just talking past each other and there’s no coherent point of dispute in this discussion. I suggest we stop having it.