It's Hard to Reason About Systems • Hillel Wayne

In programming arguments, such as static vs dynamic typing,1 people use their experiences and reason to frame these debates. However, reason is often a poor grounding for justifying complex positions. Usually warnings against using “reason” take the form of “it’s easy to be biased” or “we tend to make logical fallacies.” But this presupposes that if we were less biased we could answer the question by thinking really hard. I’d like to argue that this is actually impossible: we can’t understand something “static vs dynamic” with reason alone.