For eample I could say: "Lets assume the sun is the center of the universe." To which someone might reply: "Yes, that would work in our daily lives, but does it conform to theory?"

At some scale, what does work "in our daily lives" ('our' meaning the two people speaking) can provably not work on the scale at which politicians at international conferences must work.

Take Communism. I don't mean Socialism under the name Communism, but actual free, equal, everyone shares everything equally and works hard for it Communism. It can, among a small family-sized or tribal-sized unit with willing participation, work quite well. It has never been shown to work at sizes much larger than that. The logistics alone of just making sure people in one geographic region get an equal share of fresh crops from another geographic region are daunting.

Take credit. Two friends can lend each other money at no interest, and close friends sometimes are okay with losing exact track of who owes what to whom. That doesn't work with the bank downtown. It certainly won't work at a national or international level.

As a final example, take school curriculum standardization. It works for local districts and maybe even states in the US. It works for some whole countries. Yet I doubt you'll see Sweden and the Philippines agreeing on a standard curriculum soon. It certainly wouldn't work between India and Iran.

Communism. It can, among a small family-sized or tribal-sized unit with willing participation, work quite well. It has never been shown to work at sizes much larger than that.

I learned that a long time ago, and personally am convinced that humans are happier in tribes of roughly 100 or less....just about as nature intended. Numbers have to be low enough so that everyone knows the others( and their children) on a first name basis, and are related somehow.

If you read on the history of human tribes, at or about the 100 level, tensions and factions rise, usually resulting in a split.... now 2 separate tribes are happy. This all works well until the available land runs out.....then war and all hell breaks loose.

It is interesting to note that modern civilization does whatever it can to stomp out tribalism, it leads to gangs, and an us-against-them attitude; and in the worst cases cannibalism.

What this has to do with the French being easily mis-construed, is beyond me. :-)

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth Remember How Lucky You Are

Hm, a familiar pattern ...

They didn't care that they’d seen it work in practice because they already knew it wouldn't work in theory.

Well, if the theory is any good, then the fact that something appears to work in practice simply means that the occasions when it will break are yet to be encountered, or it hasn't been properly tested, yet.

Yup, I've seen a lot of code just like that :-)

Sounds like the inverse about the physicist joke (I'm remembering this incorrectly, I'm sure)

Farmer:  How are you going to increase my milk production?

Physicist:  First, assume a spherical cow…

Assumptions which are in contradiction to fact (I don't allow for the Earth's shape being roughly spherical in my day-to-day life) or theory (nor do I tend to worry about relativistic or quantum mechanical effects on my ride to work) are made all the time, even by people who do know better.

From what I remember of my high-school French, it's chock full of idioms, and these idioms can easily confuse the unwary, a category my French language skills never left.

I read an extract from that and saw that same quote!

I thought it was priceless. It appeals, in some strange way, to my life at work these days.

Thanks for reminding me of that.