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If your gut feeling was accurate, no one would be on vaccines and we'd all have smallpox, we'd only invest in feel-good companies that have no chance at profit,

If your gut feeling was accurate, no one would be on vaccines and we'd all have smallpox, we'd only invest in feel-good companies that have no chance at profit, and communications systems (which entirely depend on statistics) just wouldn't work. What's your point?

coldtea 8y ago
>If your gut feeling was accurate, no one would be on vaccines and we'd all have smallpox Who said his (and most people's) gut feelings says "no vaccines"?
RobertKerans 8y ago
My gut feeling is that your comment lies within a statistically common HN grouping called taking things too seriously.
nonbel 8y ago
Actually it looks like smallpox only existed since about the time statistics was invented: "our data clearly show that the VARV lineages eradicated during the 20th century had only been in existence for ∼200 years" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5196022/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5196022/ "The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics This correlation suggests that as soon as people stopped using their gut feelings smallpox evolved to take advantage.
CuriouslyC 8y ago
The problem is that people want things to be all one way or another. The reality is that in some cases it's better to trust your intuition, and in some cases it's better to trust science. It isn't so much that science is wrong, it's just that people will try to misapply toy models often generated for a different range of initial conditions. These toy models end up producing worse answers than well trained intuition.

coldtea 8y ago

>If your gut feeling was accurate, no one would be on vaccines and we'd all have smallpox Who said his (and most people's) gut feelings says "no vaccines"?

RobertKerans 8y ago

My gut feeling is that your comment lies within a statistically common HN grouping called taking things too seriously.

nonbel 8y ago

Actually it looks like smallpox only existed since about the time statistics was invented: "our data clearly show that the VARV lineages eradicated during the 20th century had only been in existence for ∼200 years" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5196022/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5196022/ "The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics This correlation suggests that as soon as people stopped using their gut feelings smallpox evolved to take advantage.

CuriouslyC 8y ago

The problem is that people want things to be all one way or another. The reality is that in some cases it's better to trust your intuition, and in some cases it's better to trust science. It isn't so much that science is wrong, it's just that people will try to misapply toy models often generated for a different range of initial conditions. These toy models end up producing worse answers than well trained intuition.