There's a distinction that's probably only obvious to people with some grad-level math: Corner cases are not the same as rare cases. Neither implies the other. "Corners" are a measure-0 subset of a space where open-nbhd/non-singleton methods don't apply Ie "special treatment"
no way. you've got a really powerful implicit notion of "good abstraction produces good results" here and I think that's wrong. tax law is extremely easily abstractable but you make a value judgment that elegant abstractions of it are bad laws. e.g. flat tax.
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That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about say writing tax software for existing taxes, not legislation. It's got high Kolmogorov complexity. You can't write elegant code for it because it's a bundle of special exemptions and stuff.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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You're conflating normative concerns ("good" tax laws) with phenomenological. Alt example with no normative angle: special-order catalogs are harder to abstract than combinatorial product offerings like Starbucks menu.
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I see what you mean. The normative angle is the interesting part though! the phenomenological side is just like, how much of a PITA is it to debug our models.
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our ability to evaluate "goodness" of an abstraction is the hard part. physics is a case where the abstraction is complicated but the evaluation is simple (prediction vs. experimental observation).
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my conjecture is that an abstraction with excessive corners is more likely to be hard to evaluate on "goodness".
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if I was a better math student I'd probably be saying something about Kolmogorov complexity now but I'm too much of dilletante to have a leg to stand on there :/
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