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Segal's Law: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."
by getToTheChopin 2y ago
Segal's Law: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."
- eimrine 2y agoIf going to voyage take 1 or 3 compasses.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoNo. 2 is better than 1. You missed the point of this link.
- ryukoposting 2y agoI think the commenter did fully grasp the meaning. Segal's law doesn't give you any clearly-defined system for grappling with uncertainty, it merely points out the existence of uncertainty and one way that we turn a blind eye to it. The best approach in some cases is to ignore uncertainty and move forward - carrying one watch, as it were. Two other valid approaches are voting and medians. These are both accomplished with 3 watches. The crux of Segal's law is that all measuring instruments are imperfect. We could bicker endlessly about the best way to use our tools, but at some point someone's just going to need to know what the damn time is.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoYou can also do voting and medians with 2 watches.
- ryukoposting 2y agoDepends if your measurements are discrete or continuous. In a continuous domain with arbitrarily long precision, your voting system's failover triggers 100% of the time.
- mojomark 2y agoOr, use Bayes theorem for an even stronger belief estimate of the 'true' local time relative to a prior-established 'universal' time. Perhaps I dropped one of my watches in the water last week or I notice the second hand on one of the watches is sticky. Bayes can account for that anecdotal information.
- eimrine 2y agoI don't understand a mathematical part of your message. Suppose you have 2 watches, does Bayes theorem allows to make a better judgement about time than calculating an average time between 2 devices?