New fallacy

[avram]

There’s a joke you may have heard:

I was walking home the other night, and I saw a guy wandering around a parking lot, looking intently at the ground. “Looking for something?” I asked. “I lost my car keys,” he replied. So I helped him out, and we spent another half hour searching every damn inch of blacktop in that part of the lot, till finally I got tired of it. “I don’t think they’re here,” I said, “Are you sure you dropped them here?” “Oh, not at all,” he told me, “I dropped them over there, on the other side of the lot.” “What? Why the hell were you wasting time looking over here?” “The light’s better here,” he said.

I’ve used this joke for a while as an example of a particular kind of thinking, where one makes a judgment based on a bad measurement just because it’s easier then trying to gather useful data. Now, thanks to Slacktivist, I find it has a name. Alfred North Whitehead dubbed it the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”.

Comments

t. rev

[(Anonymous)]

I use that joke in most of the mathematics classes I teach, as an illustration of one of the major themes of mathematics: when you can't solve a problem, find an easier one and try to solve that.