zmVault/2025-12-17.md

id, aliases, title, tags

id	aliases	title	tags
		2025-12-17	authorship/original destiny/permanent status/draft type/daily

2025-12-17

2025-12-17 05:39

One aspect of estimating that I find most interesting, but that is criminally understudied, is the effect of building dimensions (footprint shape, floor area, stories, height) on total cost.

Unfortunately, lack of interest in the subject extends beyond estimating. Discourse on spatial data seems to fall into one of two bins:

• civil engineering
• n-dimensional mathematics¹ neither are readily applicable to building construction.

Of the two, pure math would be be preferred---being generally more rigorous--- but the first bin far outweighs the second. See the difference in content from geostatistics to the conceivably far more broad spatial statistics.

[!quote] Geographic data and information Spatial data or spatial information is broader class of data whose geometry is relevant but it is not necessarily georeferenced, such as in computer-aided design (CAD), see geometric modeling.

Common Fallacies

• Reification

  [!quote] Reification ... is a fallacy of ambiguity, ...it is the error of treating something that is not concrete... as a concrete thing.

  See "the map is not the territory".

  [!aside] This one is very common among my peers in estimating. The problem with fallacies, of course, is that you can't simply say "Reification fallacy, booyah". If some one is overgeneralizing, they likely just have a different understanding of the term. Certainty of definition only occurs with some quorum, and I'd argue most of construction-estimating don't meet it, and that the choice of any term over another ought to be based on utility.

  Note also that a term's definition can be certain on some axis, but ambiguous on another. See "I know it when I see it" which, as far as I'm concerned, is a perfectly legitimate definition.

• Equivocation

  The misleading use of a word with more than one meaning

• Composition

  Assuming a whole has a property because its parts have that property

• Division

  Assuming parts have a property because the whole has that property

[!quote] Category mistake An example is a person learning that the game of cricket involves team spirit, and after being given a demonstration of each player's role, asking which player performs the "team spirit".

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1. worse still, the "space" studied in such disciplines is vector space where "distance" is a measure of similarity and physical geometry is rarely considered. ↩︎