All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#121

Post by closeparen » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:01 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #74

rossdavidh wrote: post #56

So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…

The problem is on the demand side, not solely on the supply side. People desire reinforcement not challenge. That is natural. I suspect it is true of us all. Those who are capable direct their potential to be challenged in specific ways, allowing themselves to have biases reinforced in the unimportant places. And they have access to the knowledge in their specific areas. This is the reason for the enduring power of t…

This is well known in the industry. The attitude among journalists was that they had a sort of professional and civic duty to “feed people their vegetables.” But that’s a bit too high on Maslow’s hierarchy to be thinking about when you’ve laid off 80% of the staff and still barely make payroll. (My dad lived through the peak and much of the decline at our city paper before he got out).

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#122

Post by hinkley » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

edmundsauto wrote: post #35

hinkley wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, but when you point out that a bad analogy is actually pretty accurate if you actually know anything about the other concept , people don’t want to talk about it any more. We all know that hill climbing algorithms are often naive and sometimes hilariously wrong. Nobody will disagree with you about this, until you start talking about prioritizing work, and then everyone vigorously defends their favorite hil…

Can you elaborate on your preferred strategy?

I'm gonna do this as two posts to split up the how and the why. Here is why and some hints at how:

Perf analysis was how I got through some of my most mundane college homework assignments instead of (or sometimes, in addition to) procrastinating.

Then during my formative years I saw the following script play out several times:

Management and sales have a problem. They say the customers are upset that the code is so slow (maybe the customer has expectations, or maybe a competitor or their old system went a lot faster). It's taking 300 units of time now and they think it should take 100. So the leads and the heavies wander off and come back with 20% easy, the next 10 harder, 6, 4, and then they declare that they've done all they can. So now we're around 180 units of time. That's all the customer gets. See this chart? Everything is nice and flat. Our hands are tied now. Business is... not happy. They're glad they have something to show the customer, but it's really just a bone.

So between tasks I'd start poking around, because why not. A pinch here, an architectural tweak there, and maybe 25% just gruntwork, and I'd find another 40% out of the "we've done all we can" code, which is just a hair away from what the business asked for.

You can imagine that you invite a tremendous amount of well-deserved scrutiny on yourself doing stuff like this. But that's okay: the most important part of optimization is not the code speed but the bang for the buck. You can certainly interpret "Low hanging fruit" to fulfill that concern, in practice most people don't (for some, lack of imagination, for others, ego-protection). But once you consider everything, including, for instance, externalities on QA, or the misapprehensions of customers who expect every release to be faster... there are a lot of more complicated things to worry about than how to rearrange this block of code to improve branch prediction. Not touching it for 10% is just a heuristic.

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#123

Post by kick » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #108

kick wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two richest people on the planet right now are both known for being almost entirely void of morals when it comes to their business dealings.

They're known for this because both activists and entrenched business interests benefit from promoting that narrative. Gates and Bezos both regularly talk about the impact they have on the world and why that matters more than just money - there are reasonable arguments that they've done bad things, but the idea that they're completely amoral voids is just silly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/4/1/21201162/amazon-...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-trea...

"The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." - Bezos

Gates's philanthropy is fine, but my comment was on his business dealings. He has a long history of anti-competitive behavior, completely void of morals.

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#124

Post by eropple » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

alharith wrote: post #95

parasubvert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-Fauci stuff is mostly posted by GOP-partisan organizations though as a way of bolstering Trump. On the other hand, it is pretty standard mainstream news when in the same presser, the doctors are saying the opposite of what the President is saying.

This is simply not true. MSNBC, NPR and PBS ran stories, podcasts, and discussions for an entire week about the “growing disconnect” during this time.

A disconnect that one can divine for oneself by listening to Fauci talk anytime Trump is not in the room.

Birx, too. The difference in messaging and information content when she's on that podium or on Fox programming, versus when she's on normal-people programming, is stark.

They're being leaned on and it is starkly apparent when you're not coming in with priors that tend towards conspiracy.

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#125

Post by dntbnmpls » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:16 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #56

So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…

> If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed.

No. What is wrong is that people believe the news industry exists to make people better informed. That is an industry PR lie such as "Do no evil", "Fair and Balanced", "Serve and Protect", etc. The truth is that newspapers have always lied because they were created to lie.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -- Thomas Jefferson

The NY Post was created by Alexander Hamilton solely to attack his political opponents. The lies hamilton printed in the ny post about aaron burr is one of the reasons why he got killed in the duel.

Your frustration stems from a false premise : News industry exists to keep you informed.

Instead of banging your head trying to make your conclusions fit a false premise, why not do away with a false premise?

All men are good. Harvey Weinstein is a man. Therefore, Harvey Weinstein is good.

Would you waste your life trying to find ways to show Weinstein is good? Of course not. You'd work your way through your logic and conclude your premise was wrong and that all men are not good.

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#126

Post by closeparen » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #106

monocasa wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And particularly, as the concept applies to mass media, quite a few have noted that the purpose seems to be to create the consent of the populace for what the leadership wants to do. Sometime's that's informing from a real benevolent perspective of let's get everyone on the same page for what's best to the best of our knowledge. Other times it's an obfuscation scheme to allow some to profit off of the rest of us. htt…

> the purpose seems to be to create the consent of the populace for what the leadership wants to do. Having spent a lot of time working for and with governments I can assure you that most of the time, behind closed doors, they truely hate the press, and wish it would go away. And this is true of even the most open and democratic governments. Autocratic governments, again and again have shown what they think of a free…

I think it's a question of how far outside the Overton window your own viewpoint lives.

Newspapers may pester governments with annoying questions about specific institutional failures and corrupt individuals, but they'll tend to be aligned on what the institution was supposed to achieve, what faithfully executing an office would look like.

The New York Times will ask the NYPD, "Why did you beat up that guy in a routine traffic stop?" or "How is it possible that you billed more overtime hours than there are in a week?". Not "Why haven't you shot the rich yet?"

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#127

Post by Mirioron » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #109

sah2ed wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed. It's not bad at it by mistake, it's bad at it as an inevitable consequence of its design. You speak of a failure in design as the root ca…

If you're smart enough to come up with a point like this, why not use that intelligence to make a less inane point? You're not wrong, you're just correct in a way that responds to a very narrow reading of what your parent comment was saying, and doesn't make any attempt to figure out why they'd be saying it. Clearly the person you're responding to wants a system that makes people better informed, and I think there's…

>So the question is obviously, how do we change the news ecosystem from what it is, to a system that makes people better informed?

I think that other than marginal gains, this is a pipedream. The reason the news media is the way it is is due to the choices of the people consuming it. A change in the industry itself is unlikely to put a dent into this, because people will just go elsewhere to get the 'news' they want to hear.

We would need some kind of a fundamental change in society. Maybe if we completely revamped the style of childhood education, it would be possible to change what people look for in the news. I think that practically such a fundamental change is next to impossible. People talk a lot about how we need changes to the education system, but they're usually either spewing hot air or only want small changes.

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#128

Post by dham » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

All I can think about with these models in general is the book: Jurassic Park. A lot of talk about chaos theory in the book(kind of skimmed over in the movie). I don't know how accurate all of it is, but it seems trying to model how a dinosaur park would work in the modern day could be a lot like modeling what a virus will do(although probably easier to model a Dinosaur park)

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#129

Post by dntbnmpls » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

chrischattin wrote: post #75

mola wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money. So truth ethics etc. are all secondary values.

This sounds good in an edgy r/im14andthisisdeep sort of way. But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.

> But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.

This seems like a fairy tale you tell young naive business majors with no experience. The real world isn't like that.

You think oil companies, tech companies, defense companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc have been profitable for decades because of integrity and ethics? No you become profitable and wealthy by being amoral and cutthroat then paying PR firms to spread the news about how good you were all along.

Do you think Google, Facebook, Apple, etc are so profitable because they are moral? Do you think Nike became Nike by having integrity and ethics or by exploiting cheap labor overseas?

Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

#130

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #96

sah2ed wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed. It's not bad at it by mistake, it's bad at it as an inevitable consequence of its design. You speak of a failure in design as the root ca…

"From a teleological perspective, viewing the media as a tool designed “to inform” would be a mistake, it would amount to nothing more than a supposition." I and perhaps many other people think the media should inform people; that is a statement of its purpose, and it appears that the collective actions of people in society have redesigned it to eliminate most of the informing. It doesn't have to have ever been desig…

[deleted]