3 ms·
Yeah, that’s how you ended, but I think the root cause in the piece you linked isn’t “deception” but false precision. The false precision is what gives the sens
by boulos 7y ago
Yeah, that’s how you ended, but I think the root cause in the piece you linked isn’t “deception” but false precision. The false precision is what gives the sense that it seems true.
Perhaps this is a variant of curse of dimensionality for errors? That is, if each piece of evidence is only 80% “likely”, 80% to the Nth drops like a stone.
Perhaps Dave’s Law? :).
- dahart 7y agoOoh, I like the sound of Dave’s Law. :P More seriously, I love the idea of the curse of dimensionality for errors. Random tangent, but phrasing it that way totally reminds me of the phrase ‘flaw of averages’ and the story about US jet fighters. I wasn’t thinking the author was being intentionally deceptive. It can feel like accounting for more things makes something more accurate. Sometimes it’s actually true, sometimes failing to account for all the relevant inputs is a real problem. It’s legitimately difficult to know when you’ve accounted for too little or too much, right? I guess this is just one of those times when each piece being accounted for is making the result less accurate rather than more accurate, because the data truly does have a false precision, like you said. Didn’t Google go on work-from-home a week ago? I did mid-week last week and I’m feeling stir-crazy already, but starting to wonder if the most responsible thing to do wouldn’t be to catch the virus right now and quarantine myself; guarantee I don’t spread it around.