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> can't draw ANY conclusion So, you don't trust surveys? You don't A/B test your marketing? Estimates are useful. Hell, your brain is just estimating what's i
by xapata 10y ago
> can't draw ANY conclusion
So, you don't trust surveys? You don't A/B test your marketing?
Estimates are useful. Hell, your brain is just estimating what's in front of you based on a sample of photons coming in through your eyes. If you trust your vision, you're trusting statistical sampling. I suppose it's possible the USS Enterprise is cloaked and somehow your eyes are deceiving you, but the photons are certainly correlated with what's in front of you.
Some of the best statistical innovations are simply discoveries of good proxies for something that's difficult to measure. Google found that what you search for is a good proxy for what you want to buy. Facebook found that what your friends click on is a good proxy for what you'll click on. Of course you won't like everything Netflix suggests, but its suggestions will (hopefully) be better than just picking movies randomly.
- d--b 10y agoOf course that estimates are useful. But when you use proxy data such as cars to infer demographic data and present these as the result of a census, you can see why it's problematic. You're basically using the number of pick up trucks to estimate the degree of education in the neighborhood, then you use that same number of pick up trucks to evaluate the wealthiness of that neighborhood, and then you draw a conclusion on the correlation between wealth and education, which is the very input that's hidden in your AI model. You may use census data to train a neural net to draw some conclusions, not to produce brand new census data.
- xapata 10y agoYou're assuming a great deal of incompetence in the use of the data. Why not appreciate the proxy for what it is?