[riwsky]

If you throw that in, you’d need to throw the TDD example out. A stronger test of your arguments would be, eg, research on productivity impact of generative AIs like copilot.

(This would grow your example to match your argument, whereas my initial post would shrink your argument to match your example.)

[jimmyhmiller]

The TDD example was just an example. I wasn’t taking the actual finding of the TDD research I was talking about a hypothetical finding. You can replace the examples with AIs like copilot and stipulate a large effect size. Nothing I said would really change. You still have to look at your desires to figure out what you ought to do given that research.

[riwsky]

We're talking past each other, here.

Your article presents a sufficient argument for dismissing the TDD example. Tossing effect size in, your argument still applies for dismissing an ideal study.

My point is not that what you said didn't suffice, it's that the philosophically heavyweight arguments weren't necessary. They were a hand-written recursive-descent parser, when the example could have been solved with a regex.

[jimmyhmiller]

Yeah, you could very well be right this is all overkill. But what I wanted to do was handle the general case rather than deal with things on a case by case basis. So to extend your analogy, I consider this blog post a parser generator. It isn't suppose to parse any particular text, but to allow you to create a parser for anything you want.

I've found that my short replies to empirical advocates seem to not connect. There seemed to be an assumption that I just wanted to hold onto my opinions and not think deeply about anything. So I wanted to do the exact opposite. Be as pedantic as I could (in the space of a shortish blogpost).