A small steaming kettle sitting incongruously inside a large bubbling jacuzzi.
Essays 1 min read

The Jacuzzi Fallacy

"It was worth it because of this nice thing that fell out of it" is not an argument. It's the receipt for a purchase you never compared.

Watch for this trick: someone defends a waste of time by pointing at a random good thing that fell out of it. It taught me discipline. It made me systematic. It built character. Sure — but compared to what? If you actually wanted discipline, was the long, roundabout thing really the best way to get it, or just the way you happened to take? A side benefit is real, but it doesn't make the detour worth it. It's like buying a jacuzzi to boil tea: yes, the water gets hot. That was never the cheap way to do it. And if you already own the jacuzzi, the water getting hot isn't a reason to keep brewing your tea in it.

1 Comment

  1. Kirill Yurkov
    A couple of concrete examples I left out of the post on purpose, to keep it general. Calculus — "two years of it taught me to think systematically." Maybe it did. But if systematic thinking was the goal, that was an absurdly expensive and roundabout way to buy it. String theory — "look at all the beautiful mathematics that came out of it." Decades of brilliant work, defended by its byproduct instead of the thing it actually set out to do. The post is about the test, not these examples. You'll have your own.

Continue reading