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The problem with probability is that it's actually quite a difficult topic. It is not very intuitive to most people, and it's basically the "footgun" of applied
by TrackerFF 4y ago
The problem with probability is that it's actually quite a difficult topic. It is not very intuitive to most people, and it's basically the "footgun" of applied math - things could feel right, but still be woefully incorrect. There are enough fallacies for everyone.
I'm not saying that this is a "problem" in the sense that one should discard probability and statistics - but rather that in order to truly know what's going on, you need to actually study the topics. Deeper than surface-level knowledge. It's not something you can learn over the course of a tutorial or two.
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoStatistican used to be kinda insane wizard figures in a lot of hospitals. Because thinking hard about statistics literally requires you to think really hard about unknowns and simplifying/modeling the entire world using equations. But a lot of that sense of the herculean task has been lost in the modern "data science", where neural nets are basically treated as a panacea, there are no measurement errors, and all problems are perfectly predicted. If a statistican from the 50s walked into a modern start up office, they'd laugh at the lack of validation and testing and not be at all shocked when none of the predictions worked
- epgui 4y agoThere's a quip in academia that machine learning is really just statistics, but without any assumptions checking.