new pet peeve: when people say "in theory, X should work. but in practice, it won't work, because [slightly more sophisticated theory]"
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when people say "in theory" for some reason they're usually referring to a very specific and dramatically oversimplified theory and it isn't actually that hard to come up with a better theory than the one being referred to, that will still be wrong but in more interesting ways
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in theory, x should work. but in practice, it doesn't work and i have no idea why
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programming 101
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One of my physics professors kept using the housing projects in Chicago as an example of why “good in theory, bad in practice” can’t exist — because if it’s bad in practice then the theory is bunk
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Lowkey I think he was an experimentalist sick of the oodles of funding spent on superfluous theorists whose theories don’t pan out
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