Difference That Makes No Difference

Paraphrased from the book There are Two Errors ... ISBN 1551114933 :

A man is standing next to a tree. On the other side of the tree is a frightened squirrel who is clinging belly-first to the side of the tree. The man walks around the tree, and the squirrel keeps his position directly opposite the man, belly flat to the tree at all times. Finally, the man walks all the way around the tree, and stands back in his original position, without having caught a glimpse of the squirrel. Question: Has the man walked around the squirrel?

Some people will answer yes, some people will answer no. If you ask a group of philosophy students, they will argue for hours on end. Some will say that since the man passed from the south, to the west, to the north, to the east, and back to the south again, the man has therefore walked around the squirrel. Some will say that since the squirrel kept his belly facing the man the whole time, the man could not have walked around the squirrel.

The real answer is: Who cares? It makes no difference one way or the other. We all understand exactly what happened, and arguing about the definition of the word 'around' does not change that understanding in any useful way.

Definitions are important, and finding the right definition for a concept can be useful; and it can also be a waste of time... if the difference in the definition makes no difference in RealLife.

Alternate answer: To whom, and for what purpose? Whenever the question is a matter of vague semantics, it can be answered only by first answering those two questions.

I once realized that the correct answer to every single question imaginable is who cares?. This depressed me greatly, since if nobody cared about anything, I couldn't see any real reason to even live. Then it suddenly went up for me: who cares? is also the correct answer to the ultimate question itself: who cares whether nobody cares?

An alternative view regarding the statement "It makes no difference one way or the other". Put it this way, whatever happened in the story makes no difference one way or the other, almost by definition. No matter what question you ask about the story, even simple ones that have simple answers, such as "How many steps has the man made during his walk around the tree?" make no difference. Because you have not stated anything that depends on anything about the story.

So isn't is simpler to skip the story/example altogether and simply state that "If the answer to a question makes no difference, don't spend time thinking about the question.".

BTW, I have met managers who insist on finding answers to questions that make no difference. For example, a system once trapped with a cryptic hex number. The OS people got the number and began working on it. Yet the manager insisted on having us waste time to dig up the description of the error noted by the hex number. Not surprisingly, the error description was just as incomprehensible to the manager and the rest of us as the hex number, and was just as useless to us.

This reminds me of a pleasant slogan: information is a difference that makes a difference.

The answer to the question in the story is correctly given as "Who cares?", but the question "Who Cares?" is not necessarily rhetorical. If it has an answer X you can then ask "Why does X care?", and that may lead you to a useful answer to the original question.