Small changes that seem trivial can accumulate to produce significant changes.
Eubulides's paradox: one grain is not a heap, adding one never makes a heap, yet a heap exists. It is the standing problem for every threshold in law and policy, from age limits to blood alcohol.
In practice
- A manager asked when the backlog became a crisis can name no week in which it did, and the crisis is on the agenda.
- Every threshold in law and policy inherits the problem: no single day makes someone an adult, and a line must be drawn anyway.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Paradoxes that broke theories, and sayings that outlived them