Black-Box Fallacies
To deal with complexity, we need to analyze things into components, and hide information inside those components. The black-box metaphor is common in science and engineering. A black box is a system with a well-defined and well-understood interface. The contents of the system are either hidden or can be ignored. We can think about the system only in terms of its “surface”: the inputs and outputs. Hence the term “black box”. In science and engineering, we call things “black boxes” if either (a) we don’t know how they work, or (b) we choose to ignore how they work, usually to simplify reasoning. For example, a black-box optimization algorithm has two inputs: a space S and a black-box function U : S → R. The algorithm has no access to the internal details of U. It can only apply U to points in S. From this information, the algorithm tries to find a point in the space that has the highest value of U, within time constraints. Any black-box optimization algorithm must sample ...