I find a lot of statements these days describes a fact about something and then call it the “best”. It’s like someone saying “look number 2 is so great, it’s the only even prime number, it’s so cool that it’s used as the base of digital systems, so we should use 2" And someone else says: “well, number 3 is cool because it’s the first Mersenne prime, and it has a super cool divisibility rule, so we should use 3”. At the end of the day, if the question is 1+1, then 2 is infinitly better than 3, and the other way around if the question is 4-1. And if you just need some positive integer as a placehold or something, then well, they are the same. People seems to like and re-post these information a lot. I think these facts do provide some values, like the whole entertainment industry, it fulfills the curiosity of our minds and keeps us, well, entertained. But drawing the conclusion that something is better, or something should be used instead of another thing based on these facts just feels off to me. It’s especially bad IMO, when people use these statements in PR reviews.

I totally agree. Better and worse is always a decision to make in a specific context. What you call facts I tend to call forces. Mostly they take the form of trade-offs. Everything makes some things easy and other things difficult.

Love this example/analogy. It’s fascinating to me how most people in technology get away with arguing that whatever technical thing they like best and are most familiar with is objectively superior to everything else in all cases. They do, probably, because the “in all cases” is usually silent and most of us have a complicated relationship to anything context-dependent.

The divisibility rule of 3 really is super cool, though.

@Denny Vrandečić yup!