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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yeah wtf, "in practice," should be followed by a description of something that happened in real life
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Hmm in their defense, good theories tend to be simple, as per Occam's razor and this great 'Fuck Nuance' paper: kieranhealy.org/files/papers/f
I think there's an element of understanding first principles, then applying it to the specific context at hand.
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