3 ms·

>To me, what your example really shows is the problem with incorrect default values, not a problem with encoding data into a key per se. If they'd chosen a non-

>To me, what your example really shows is the problem with incorrect default values, not a problem with encoding data into a key per se. If they'd chosen a non-date for unknown values, maybe 00 or 99 for day or month components, then the issue you described would disappear. You still have that problem from organic birthdays and also the problem of needing to change ids to correct birth dates.

jonny_eh 11mo ago
To add to that, birthdays can clump, just like any seemingly "random" data.
- lovich 11mo ago
  A million dots scattered randomly over a graph can all land on the exact same coordinate if it’s truly random. What most people intuit as random is some sort of noise function that is generally dispersed and doesn’t trigger the pattern matching part of their brain
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    > A million dots scattered randomly over a graph can all land on the exact same coordinate if it’s truly random. It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts. > What most people intuit as random is some sort of noise function that is generally dispersed and doesn’t trigger the pattern matching part of their brain Yes, people intuit the texture of random wrong in a situation where most buckets are empty. But when you have orders of magnitude more events than buckets, that effect doesn't apply. You get pretty even results that people expect.
    - lovich 11mo ago
      > It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts. It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots. The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.
      - Dylan16807 11mo ago
        Entropy says it's special. If you have a million dots and 10,000 coordinates, you have 10,000 ways for all the dots to land in the same coordinate, and a zillion kavillion stupillion ways to have somewhere near 100 dots in each coordinate.
        lovich 11mo ago
        No, if its randomly distributed then every specific configuration has the same exact chance of happening. I am laughing at all the people coming out of the woodwork to reply to my original post in this thread misunderstanding randomness and chance. If you flip a coin a million times and it lands on head every single time, the millionth and 1 time still has a 50/50 chance of landing on heads
        Dylan16807 11mo ago
        > every specific configuration Who said anything about specific configurations? We started this talking about whether things "clump" or not. The result depends on your definition of "clump" but let's say it involves a standard deviation. Different standard deviations have wildly different probabilities, even when every specific configuration has the same probability. Nobody responding to you is calculating things wrong. We're talking about the shape of the data. Categories. And those categories are different sizes, because they have different numbers of specific configurations in them. > the millionth and 1 time I don't see any connection between the above discussion and the gambler's fallacy?
        moi2388 11mo ago
        No, because most likely the coin wasn’t a fair coin then, or there was some other bias going on
        lovich 11mo ago
        Im talking about true random. If you believe there is a bias, then you dont believe its a random selection
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  Not significantly. For actual births, a couple holidays have very low rates but clumping into much higher rates happens on no dates.

jonny_eh 11mo ago

To add to that, birthdays can clump, just like any seemingly "random" data.

lovich 11mo ago
A million dots scattered randomly over a graph can all land on the exact same coordinate if it’s truly random. What most people intuit as random is some sort of noise function that is generally dispersed and doesn’t trigger the pattern matching part of their brain
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  > A million dots scattered randomly over a graph can all land on the exact same coordinate if it’s truly random. It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts. > What most people intuit as random is some sort of noise function that is generally dispersed and doesn’t trigger the pattern matching part of their brain Yes, people intuit the texture of random wrong in a situation where most buckets are empty. But when you have orders of magnitude more events than buckets, that effect doesn't apply. You get pretty even results that people expect.
  - lovich 11mo ago
    > It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts. It has the same odds as any other specific configuration of randomly assigned dots. The overly active human pattern matching behavior is the only reason it would be treated as special.
    - Dylan16807 11mo ago
      Entropy says it's special. If you have a million dots and 10,000 coordinates, you have 10,000 ways for all the dots to land in the same coordinate, and a zillion kavillion stupillion ways to have somewhere near 100 dots in each coordinate.
      - lovich 11mo ago
        No, if its randomly distributed then every specific configuration has the same exact chance of happening. I am laughing at all the people coming out of the woodwork to reply to my original post in this thread misunderstanding randomness and chance. If you flip a coin a million times and it lands on head every single time, the millionth and 1 time still has a 50/50 chance of landing on heads
        Dylan16807 11mo ago
        > every specific configuration Who said anything about specific configurations? We started this talking about whether things "clump" or not. The result depends on your definition of "clump" but let's say it involves a standard deviation. Different standard deviations have wildly different probabilities, even when every specific configuration has the same probability. Nobody responding to you is calculating things wrong. We're talking about the shape of the data. Categories. And those categories are different sizes, because they have different numbers of specific configurations in them. > the millionth and 1 time I don't see any connection between the above discussion and the gambler's fallacy?
        moi2388 11mo ago
        No, because most likely the coin wasn’t a fair coin then, or there was some other bias going on
        lovich 11mo ago
        Im talking about true random. If you believe there is a bias, then you dont believe its a random selection
Dylan16807 11mo ago
Not significantly. For actual births, a couple holidays have very low rates but clumping into much higher rates happens on no dates.