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networked comments on Open thread, Sep. 28 - Oct. 4, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I found that variations on the following exchange are very common on programming forums:
Suppose Alice is correct on the statistics: most code that uses feature X uses it in a way that Alice and Bob would both agree to be wrong. Suppose Bob still disagrees with her over it making the feature bad. He disagrees not because he thinks the good uses outweigh the bad ones but because it is possible, in principle, to only use feature X the right way. Is there a specific name for their kind of disagreement?
In the 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was not illegal to produce videotape recorders, even if buyers would mostly use them to pirate TV shows, as long as the recorders had some possible lawful use. Shall we call this the VCR disagreement?
I like "the VCR disagreement". It sounds nice and evokes visual associations (a courtroom, a VCR) that might help one remember it. Since no alternative has been found or proposed I will start using this term for the phenomenon.
On a related note, I wonder if there is a search system that matches vague descriptions of phenomena to (existing) definitions better than Google. (Googling "a search system that matches vague descriptions of phenomena to existing definitions" didn't yield any interesting results.)