100 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed perfect logicians live on an island, but none knows the color of their own eyes. There are no mirrors on the island, and communicating is forbidden. If any of them works out the color of their eyes, they must leave the island in the night.
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The mathematically-minded have learned, through practical experience, to ignore those details. This is certainly a skill, and a useful one for anyone writing code for a living.
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But the same people can have a tendency to apply these abstraction skills to real-life scenarios, as if they were contrived by a puzzle-setter; with great swathes of detail disregarded as irrelevant, and moral equivalence established between ostensibly quite different situations.
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I think it's unfortunate that something that is a useful skill for reasoning in some contexts may be so detrimental to reasoning in some other contexts, and as a programmer, I sometimes wish that my own zeal to snap to some perceived essence of a problem wasn't so strong.
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