False Positives and False Negatives are both dangerous, but often in different ways. It would be hard to draw a simple equivalence outside of the context. Some

False Positives and False Negatives are both dangerous, but often in different ways. It would be hard to draw a simple equivalence outside of the context. Sometimes not seeing a connection is much more dangerous, than finding a spurious connection. It is a question of whether erroneous action is better than erroneous inaction as well as the relative likely hood of these two. Many times erroneous inaction is better than erroneous inaction since it is easier to fix later - though the likelihood matters. In many systems with hysteresis there is also often risk that a false positive implies a greater risk of a false negative elsewhere (if the system erroneously switches into scanning for 'X' mode, this effectively raises a risk of false negatives scanning for 'Y'). In such cases a false positive would carry greater weight than a false negative.