Exercise 2: Why Two Contradictory Sayings Being Both Accepted Is a Genuine Problem — Possible Solution
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If both sayings were simply "sometimes true," that alone wouldn't be
a problem - lots of genuinely true claims about people only apply in
some situations and not others, and a good theory can specify real
conditions under which each one applies. The real issue is more
specific than "these aren't universally true."

The genuine problem is that folk wisdom, as actually used in everyday
conversation, almost never specifies IN ADVANCE which saying applies
to a given situation - people tend to reach for whichever one happens
to fit AFTER they already know the outcome. If a relationship between
two very different people works out, "opposites attract" gets
invoked; if a relationship between two similar people works out,
"birds of a feather flock together" gets invoked instead. Whichever
outcome actually occurred, some matching saying is available to
explain it after the fact.

This means neither saying is actually making a real, falsifiable
PREDICTION the way a genuine scientific claim from Chapter 1's own
definition would - there's no way for either one to ever be
proven wrong, since a contradictory saying is always available to
explain whatever happens instead. That's a direct, concrete instance
of the unfalsifiability problem the chapter identifies: a claim survives
not because it's been tested and confirmed, but because it can always
be quietly swapped for its opposite once the answer is already known -
itself an echo of the very hindsight-bias problem the chapter closes
with.

ANSWER: The genuine problem isn't that both sayings are merely
"sometimes true" - it's that neither one makes a real, falsifiable
prediction in advance, since whichever outcome actually occurs, a
matching saying is always available afterward to explain it. This
means folk wisdom like this can never actually be tested or proven
wrong, unlike a genuine scientific claim, and it works by the same
after-the-fact-fitting logic as the hindsight bias covered later in
the chapter.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This identifies the real unfalsifiability mechanism (a saying always
available after the fact) rather than simply noting the two sayings
contradict each other, and connects it back to the chapter's own
hindsight-bias material.