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That’s a good thing. We’ve introduced math, probability, statistics, etc into every day life. “Show me the numbers” and “show me the data” is how we should lo

That’s a good thing. We’ve introduced math, probability, statistics, etc into every day life. “Show me the numbers” and “show me the data” is how we should look at more problems

derbOac 5y ago
That's generally my schema for the world, but the article raises a very good and important point, which is that those probabilities are sort of fictions at some level, because they're associated with a model that itself can be, or almost certainly is sometimes, incorrect. In Bayes land, that's because basically P(interesting thing|obs) = P(obs|interesting thing) * P(interesting thing | model) * P(model) ... but we forget the last part. What they're pointing to is the fact we could assign a probability to each of those probabilities we hear, which is more accurate, but we generally don't, and it can have fundamental, wide-ranging implications. I guess it raises the question of whether it's better to not put numbers on things at all sometimes, or to put numbers on things but pretend that they're infallible. I don't know -- I guess I thought it made a good point about what to make of probability statements based on made-up models of reality rather than reality itself, about changing targets.
bberenberg 5y ago
I would be careful about this argument. A couple well known examples are average cockpit sizes causing higher pilot mortality rates [1] and a whole book on how design of items for average sizes has hurt women in a variety of ways [2] 1 https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... 2 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/28/invisible-women-by-caroline-criado-perez-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/28/invisible-wome... Using the data is good, if you truly understand the data.
- melling 5y ago
  What alternative should we use? Back to going with your gut? I not sure we should go back to complete ignorance because someone might not understand the problem well enough.

That’s a good thing. We’ve introduced math, probability, statistics, etc into every day life. “Show me the numbers” and “show me the data” is how we should look at more problems

derbOac 5y ago

That's generally my schema for the world, but the article raises a very good and important point, which is that those probabilities are sort of fictions at some level, because they're associated with a model that itself can be, or almost certainly is sometimes, incorrect. In Bayes land, that's because basically P(interesting thing|obs) = P(obs|interesting thing) * P(interesting thing | model) * P(model) ... but we forget the last part. What they're pointing to is the fact we could assign a probability to each of those probabilities we hear, which is more accurate, but we generally don't, and it can have fundamental, wide-ranging implications. I guess it raises the question of whether it's better to not put numbers on things at all sometimes, or to put numbers on things but pretend that they're infallible. I don't know -- I guess I thought it made a good point about what to make of probability statements based on made-up models of reality rather than reality itself, about changing targets.

bberenberg 5y ago

I would be careful about this argument. A couple well known examples are average cockpit sizes causing higher pilot mortality rates [1] and a whole book on how design of items for average sizes has hurt women in a variety of ways [2] 1 https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... 2 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/28/invisible-women-by-caroline-criado-perez-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/28/invisible-wome... Using the data is good, if you truly understand the data.

melling 5y ago
What alternative should we use? Back to going with your gut? I not sure we should go back to complete ignorance because someone might not understand the problem well enough.