Needless to say i’m talking about the oversimplified and misleading version of the Schrödinger’s cat paradigm, where he is both dead and alive until you watch it.
I don’t have a job but i follow theater courses at an academy. And my improvisation is both funny and awful until i show it to others.
Code is both great and terrible until it compiles.
In programming there is also the Heisenbug: as soon as you try to observe the bug, it disappears or changes its behavior.
My company is basically 30 startups in a trenchcoat. The bulk of our my org’s application was written 5-10 years ago by like 4 dudes, none of whom work at the company anymore. Cowboy coding doesn’t come close. We have so much legacy code and I alternate between “how the fuck does this work” in an impressed way and a horrified way anytime I look at it
It could be something not working or maybe the operator doesn’t know you have to push the big green button that says “START” to start the machine. I’m a mechanic at a food processing plant.
I’m not sure I understand the question
If you’re looking for a “something is two opposites at once until met” then that’s anywhere any unsureness exists. Lesson plans are decent and lacking until taught to students. Visual art is pretty and dismal until witnessed by another beholder. Speeches are rousing and dogshit til spoken at the mic.
If you’re looking for a “something that’s explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)” then that’s like a subset of all misconceptions.
- Monads in programming. Lots of people say they “get it” after a simplified explanation, but actually don’t get it (judging by blog posts that recite a simplified explanation, but actually don’t get it).
- Tariffs. Lots of people learn middle school mercantilism (zero sum wealth) then guess that the economy is still import export balance, and that if we make people exporting to us more expensive then we get more of the zero sum pie. (Obviously wrong, and a basic macroeconomic lesson on consumer welfare in a system with a world price is useful)
- A lot of physics terms tbh. “I get momentum, that’s when it’s hard to stop when you’re fast.” Often they mean something closer to inertia. “I get the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It’s when seeing something changes it!” It’s closer to uncertainty in the measurement of tiny things because of the physical implication of what we measure it using. (e.g. by reading a photon off of something, we know we’re kinda inaccurate cuz the photon was discharged)
If you’re looking for a “something that’s explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)”
I studied math and my first thought here is Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Software both works perfectly (on the developers machine and most deployed instances) and fails dramatically (on some significant subset of deployed instances).
This makes the software both a success (since it works, and can generate revenue) and a failure (since it is unreliable, and may alienate paying customers).
“The Computer never makes a mistake” is true and also probably responsible for people believing LLM-hallucinations uncritically
