The Fallacy of the Shortcut

I stumbled upon the concept of 'The fallacy of the shortcut' in my wanderings today- a valuable illusion to be aware of. It's one of many examples of how our conceptualizations and models about the world can lose validity when applied to, well, the real world. How we can get caught up in a concept and ignore the limits of its application, or perhaps more accurately, the limits of the world that we're trying to apply it to.

An example of this fallacy is shown in the diagram below which shows a map of standard, rectangular city streets. The fallacy of the shortcut can arise when we consider what route to take when traveling from one corner of the grid to another. It's natural to want to take the diagonal route (shown in green) because that's the shortest distance between the 2 points. But since we're limited to traveling only on the grid of the actual streets it turns out that the only 'diagonal' available to us (shown in blue) is no shorter than other possible routes (shown in red and yellow). As a matter of fact, all routes taken from one black dot to the other that do not overtly reverse in direction will cover the exact same distance.

The blue route is only 'conceptually diagonal', because at no point does it actually proceed in a diagonal direction. So, it's a fallacy that it is the shorter route. The fallacy comes about because the mind tries to apply a valid concept in an invalid way. It makes you ponder how much of our challenge in life is about bridging and reconciling this gap between pure theory vs real world application. How easy it is to focus on the pedantic vs the applied.

Many ancient traditions recognized this problem and included the concept of 'Earth Energy' vs 'Sky Energy' in our world, and how they must be balanced if we want to live wisely. The 'Sky' represents potential- that which is theoretically possible. The 'Earth' represents the specifics of what we have to work with. The local conditions. As intriguing and mystical as it is to talk about these concepts in the same breath as tarot cards, incense, crystals and such, they are more directly illustrated by pondering this trip across the grid of city streets, with the 'Sky' representing our ideal diagonal route across town and the 'Earth' representing the limitations of the actual right angled grid of the roads.

Yes, the ideal route would proceed diagonally- but not until they bulldoze half the city and lay a new road. And I haven't even discussed traffic lights or taxi fares...