With my last post, I created an elegant definition of Guacamole and Smashed Avocado. Those definitions don't really fall in line with the historical background of Guacamole, although the sources I could find for making that declaration were less than ideal. However, the definition I created does seem to me to fit the modern understanding as Guacamole is described as a 'value-added' product from the original avocado, implying that it is more complex than just mushing it up.
The question I got back from Sweetness, who liked my solution, was why is it when 3 ingredients are combined with avocado is guacamole created? It seems like 3 is a completely arbitrary choice to be a defining characteristic of something, so why not 2, 5, or 10? It's true there is no real reason to pick 3 that can be pointed to other than the support that I gave that Smashed Avocado was based on its simplicity so the number of ingredients should be indicative of that simplistic nature.
Yet anchoring my definition to 3 and 3 being arbitrary doesn't make the definition wrong or even bad. There is a necessity in many situations (the drinking age, driving age, age of consent, military age) where a number has to be picked. It could be argued that there could be a merit-based solution where some system of merit could be used in substitute of a number so that it wouldn't have to be arbitrary, but that solution could be expensive, time-consuming, or hard to achieve. What would a merit-based test for being able to drink alcohol?
Take any of those issues and pick a number. Now that number could be just as defensible as other numbers so that it would be a reasonable choice or it could be less defensible. With the Smashed Avocado when I was thinking about it I thought that both 3-4 ingredients were the best solution. Both 2 and 5 were also reasonable choices and could have been chosen, but one seemed a little too simple and the other was starting to become too complicated, while the rest of the choices, 0 or anything above 5, looked awful. This is the same for the drinking age and military age where anywhere between 15-19 seems reasonable and each age beyond those numbers becomes increasingly hard to defend.
This displays the arbitrary nature of making age-related choices, but it also alludes to the necessity of having restrictions on those choices. There are good reasons to want to exclude 8-year-olds from driving a car, or voting, reasons which, in general, slowly become invalidated as a person becomes older.
In the case of Guacamole vs Smashed Avocado, there didn't seem to be any other way to create a definition based on history or consensus so it seemed to necessitate the arbitrary definition. The whole situation reminds me of a great quote from the movie Argo, "This is the best bad idea we have, sir.' [Side note, I swear there is a famous quote that is roughly equivalent to that quote but made by a famous politician, but I could not find it after about 30 minutes of searching...I would be very grateful for anyone who knows that quote I'm thinking about to add it as a comment.]
Setting an arbitrary number like this really also shifts the burden of proof back onto anyone who wants to criticize that choice, as through the act of picking an arbitrary number and making the argument that it is as good as any other number the situation has been created where someone then has to attempt to show why that number is worse than any other number or that the number isn't needed. Anytime an arbitrary number is picked it then has the benefit of not having to be better than any other choice, but simply not having to be worse.
With that, my next post, which I've already mostly completed, is about a situation where necessary arbitrary choices fail.
The question I got back from Sweetness, who liked my solution, was why is it when 3 ingredients are combined with avocado is guacamole created? It seems like 3 is a completely arbitrary choice to be a defining characteristic of something, so why not 2, 5, or 10? It's true there is no real reason to pick 3 that can be pointed to other than the support that I gave that Smashed Avocado was based on its simplicity so the number of ingredients should be indicative of that simplistic nature.
Yet anchoring my definition to 3 and 3 being arbitrary doesn't make the definition wrong or even bad. There is a necessity in many situations (the drinking age, driving age, age of consent, military age) where a number has to be picked. It could be argued that there could be a merit-based solution where some system of merit could be used in substitute of a number so that it wouldn't have to be arbitrary, but that solution could be expensive, time-consuming, or hard to achieve. What would a merit-based test for being able to drink alcohol?
In the case of Guacamole vs Smashed Avocado, there didn't seem to be any other way to create a definition based on history or consensus so it seemed to necessitate the arbitrary definition. The whole situation reminds me of a great quote from the movie Argo, "This is the best bad idea we have, sir.' [Side note, I swear there is a famous quote that is roughly equivalent to that quote but made by a famous politician, but I could not find it after about 30 minutes of searching...I would be very grateful for anyone who knows that quote I'm thinking about to add it as a comment.]
Setting an arbitrary number like this really also shifts the burden of proof back onto anyone who wants to criticize that choice, as through the act of picking an arbitrary number and making the argument that it is as good as any other number the situation has been created where someone then has to attempt to show why that number is worse than any other number or that the number isn't needed. Anytime an arbitrary number is picked it then has the benefit of not having to be better than any other choice, but simply not having to be worse.
With that, my next post, which I've already mostly completed, is about a situation where necessary arbitrary choices fail.
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