4 ms·

Really? Laws of probability works against your argument. Such a basic course in statistics needs to be scrutinized.

californical 3mo ago
Every breath you take, there is a 99.99% chance that everything is normal, and a 0.01% chance that you breathe mild acid which horribly burns and causes a massive coughing fit. It probably don’t cause long term damage unless that breath happened to be more important than normal, like while driving right as a child runs into the road. Would you act differently knowing that you had one of these occasional acid breaths? Even if it only happened once per day on average (0.001%)
- elendilm 3mo ago
  And your point is? Laws of probability doesn't discriminate. There is always a probability a planet killer GRB hits us and we all die. Should we take precautions in our everyday life. Or should we wear helmet while walking on the road pray a coconut not falling on our head is just 99.999%.
- ziofill 3mo ago
  You are correct, but this is a made up example, not a practical matter. You’re falling into the same trap as the author.
  - elendilm 3mo ago
    You must have come to rescue him :) from the "incorrect" trap.
maxbond 3mo ago
If 1 in 10,000 people have a disease, then a "test" which always reports the patient doesn't have the disease will be correct 99.99% of the time. "99.99% accuracy" should be "looked at with skepticism" in that it doesn't tell you what you need to know to understand the quality of a a test for a rare disease (a classifier under conditions of severe class imbalance); at a minimum, you would want to understand it's false positive and false negative rate, not (just) it's overall error rate. See example "A": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
- elendilm 3mo ago
  If only stating the obvious was a fallacy :) You appear not to have understood probability theory my friend. You will never get 100% in this universe for anything. What if "its a simulation" or "a dream" arguments ensures you never acheive 100%. Bayes probability theory will be a good start for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
  - maxbond 3mo ago
    Well, I do agree that all measurements contain error, but the point wasn't that the error rate would be greater than 0% but that a single headline summary of error can't always distinguish between good and bad tests.

Every breath you take, there is a 99.99% chance that everything is normal, and a 0.01% chance that you breathe mild acid which horribly burns and causes a massive coughing fit. It probably don’t cause long term damage unless that breath happened to be more important than normal, like while driving right as a child runs into the road. Would you act differently knowing that you had one of these occasional acid breaths? Even if it only happened once per day on average (0.001%)

elendilm 3mo ago
And your point is? Laws of probability doesn't discriminate. There is always a probability a planet killer GRB hits us and we all die. Should we take precautions in our everyday life. Or should we wear helmet while walking on the road pray a coconut not falling on our head is just 99.999%.
ziofill 3mo ago
You are correct, but this is a made up example, not a practical matter. You’re falling into the same trap as the author.
- elendilm 3mo ago
  You must have come to rescue him :) from the "incorrect" trap.

maxbond 3mo ago

If 1 in 10,000 people have a disease, then a "test" which always reports the patient doesn't have the disease will be correct 99.99% of the time. "99.99% accuracy" should be "looked at with skepticism" in that it doesn't tell you what you need to know to understand the quality of a a test for a rare disease (a classifier under conditions of severe class imbalance); at a minimum, you would want to understand it's false positive and false negative rate, not (just) it's overall error rate. See example "A": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

elendilm 3mo ago
If only stating the obvious was a fallacy :) You appear not to have understood probability theory my friend. You will never get 100% in this universe for anything. What if "its a simulation" or "a dream" arguments ensures you never acheive 100%. Bayes probability theory will be a good start for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
- maxbond 3mo ago
  Well, I do agree that all measurements contain error, but the point wasn't that the error rate would be greater than 0% but that a single headline summary of error can't always distinguish between good and bad tests.