My Problem with the Law of Triviality

My Problem with the Law of Triviality

If you don’t know what that is, read this first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

My problem is that I feel like there are more forces at play here than “trivial vs not trivial”. To quote Wikipedia (I realize this isn’t the primary source but I’m just gonna trust that it summarizes the original point well),

“A reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it (see ambiguity aversion), so one assumes that those who work on it understand it. However, everyone can visualize a cheap, simple bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to implement their own proposal and demonstrate personal contribution.”

The problem with this is that in the canonical example, the disproportionate amount of time isn’t spent because the bike shed is trivial, it’s that it’s easy to have an opinion about. Here’s what I think the original law of triviality represents:

And here’s what I think the full picture is:

I think this is important, because one discussion my aerial robotics team had today reminded me of bikeshedding but really wasn’t. It was about whether or not our drone should drop its payload using a parachute mechanism. For this decision, lots of people on the team had opinions and there was much discussion, and it kinda reminded me of bikeshedding decisions, but I think the difference is that it actually was an important decision. To make an analogy to the nuclear reactor case, it would be like a discussion of where the reactor should be built. Laymen can easily form opinions about this but it actually is an important decision. So, it’s important to spot when a decision could have many easy opinions but actually is important, versus actual bikeshedding.

Have any thoughts you’d like to share? Email me at epedley@uci.edu because I haven’t set up comments on this blog yet 🦥