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John Roberts's avatar

I am terrible at math but I think I understand the points made in the article that if it doesn’t work we will do a mathematical magic trick so it will.

Modeling.

When I saw the word and after reading the article, it made me think of building a model car and claiming it was a real car might be a simple analogy, maybe ???

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Korpijarvi's avatar

> You sit at your desk and torture maths equations until they scream that the 50 km is really 100 km. You convince yourself that you really cycled 100 km.

Even more accurately, you sit at your desk and claim that the 50km expanded to 100km while you were cycling it because of some magic operation of the road beneath your feet, but it's still the equivalent of 100km of cycling that you did. Then come up with math to model that, in support of your assertion.

This is a wonderful piece, Doc. This exact sort of "thinking" gets applied in all fields that use quanty methods. Desired-conclusion-justifying coefficients are the Leatherman multitool for so much of what passes for empirical truth. And it's so much easier, and more professionally rewarding, to gin up malarkey than to point it out/deconstruct it.

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