A Man from Zheng Buys Shoes; A Rationalist Fable

Among Chinese language-learners, 成语 (or four-character idioms) are (in)famous for their opacity. In the best case, they make sense if you happen to be able to read classical Chinese. And in the worst case, they’re references to random stories, which you have to then learn and memorize in addition to the idiom itself. And there are… whole dictionaries of these fucking things. It can seem more like a hazing ritual than useful content for a language class, especially before you’re able to judge which ones are commonly used and which are too obscure to bother with.

Anyhow. My favorite 成语 is 郑人买履, which refers to a fable written in ~250 BCE by Han Fei:

A man from the state of Zheng was in need of a new pair of shoes.

Before setting out for the market, he measured his feet with the use of a string. Upon arriving, he perused the shoe-sellers’ selections and found a pair that interested him. It was at this point, however, that he discovered that he had forgotten to bring the string.

Rushing home, he retrieved the string and hurried back to the market. But it had already closed, and the shoe-sellers had already packed up their wares and left. There was nothing to do but head home empty-handed.

When recounting this story to his neighbors, they asked, “Why didn’t you just try the shoes on?”

The man replied, “But I trust the measurement over my own feet!”

The idiom can refer to any overly stubborn adherence to rules or inflexible application of theory that fails to engage with reality. However, more specifically, it’s a really good way of explaining screening off. If you already have your actual feet and can try on actual shoes, then having a measurement of them is not going to provide you any more information.

The current top result on Google for “screening off” is a Less Wrong wiki page that opens with a bunch of probabilistic equations right off the bat. I expect it’s about as opaque to the average person as 成语 are to first year language learners. If you’re looking for a more accessible and amusing explanation of causal graphs and proxies, consider sharing the story of a man who wanted to buy some shoes.

personal finance influencer called Koshchei the Debtless who makes instructional videos about how to advantageously structure shell corporations and shield assets during bankruptcy

There's an old programmer proverb, "Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in."

So yeah, you probably do want a separate production and test environment. And the test environment should be realistic, so your tests tell you something about production. But it shouldn't be too realistic. For instance, you don't want to accidentally charge people's credit cards for real during tests.

So yeah, you probably don't want the actual payments to go through in your test site. And real products shouldn't ship when orders are made on the test site. But you still have to be careful about the separation. For instance, you don't want to accidentally leave the test site accessible to the public.

And you really don't want to accidentally paste links to your test environment into a google ad campaign, thereby paying money to trick willing customers into making fake orders with real confirmation emails, that redirect them to paypal and all that jazz but nonetheless fail to charge them or send them orders.

All this is to say, I have recently been doing some uncompensated labor helping a company to debug how exactly they fucked up my wife's birthday present.

Is it good if the Uber driver is making the sign of the cross? Or do they only do that when they're about to crash the car?