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All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong

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

#141

Post by kick »

com2kid wrote: post #132
kick wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dealing…

Nestle poisons entire cities and has killed thousands of babies. Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did. The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_...

    Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal
    to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing
    an argument or complaint due to what are perceived 
    to be more important problems. First World problems
    are a subset of this fallacy.
Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.

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

#142

Post by kerkeslager »

Mirioron wrote: post #127
kerkeslager wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree. The last bit of what you're saying is particularly telling. It seems to me that you think large change is impossible because you think large changes happens all at once, instead of as a series of small changes, and as a result you're undervaluing small changes.

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

#143

Post by noizejoy »

tartoran wrote: post #48
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…

The low hanging fruit metaphor meaning do the simplest or easiest work first is not really applicable to fruit growing but seems to have been coopted by the busieness world instead, then we started using it too in our contexts. Not crazy about this metaphor either, but it could be useful in some contexts and while also misunderstood in others. The same goes for most jargon.

The “low hanging fruit” makes a lot more sense in a hunter/gatherer context than in an agricultural context

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

qppo wrote: post #138
cousin_it wrote: post #68

> Journalists must get quotes from other experts before publishing No, this isn't enough. This whole way of thinking isn't enough. It's a big part of the reason for the current situation. Journalists should report what's true, not what Tom, Dick or Harry said. If a journalist isn't qualified to make object-level claims on a given topic, don't write on that topic. For example, if Bob says there's a forest fire, then i…

That's a bad example. Take the claim: - 3 million people lost their jobs . - 3 million people lost their jobs, according to - 3 million people lost their jobs, according to , while estimates as many as 5 million during the same time frame. Which one of these is the best framing of "the truth?" Because rarely is something worth reporting on some axiomatic statement of fact. Not only because boolean states don't normal…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by dennis_jeeves »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #37
grawprog wrote: post #9

What I've noticed about models, or at least when people are talking about them or trying to prove a point about them, is that people forget models are a simplified version of a specific part of reality, much the same as models of airplanes or something. No matter how many variables you include, you can never capture the utterly massive and unpredictable amount of variables that exist in reality. But they're not suppo…

Humans have the tendency to think they understand something if they have a label on it. It helps them take decisions faster, whether it's good or bad. If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless. If you tell them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered. It just means they have an inflammation of the bronchi. It says no…

>If you tell people you don't know what causes their respiratory illness, they may think you are incompetent, and feel helpless.

Agreed, on the medical front this also leads to a focus on sophisticated diagnostic tools and numbers versus a 'true' cure.

>Call something a democracy, and nobody will check if it is. >Call something a privilege, and people will start to want it, working hard for it.

Let me add one more to the list. Call something a 'right' and people feel denied if they are not given it. Eg. voting rights. Even where one can vote, consent is generally manufactured but people feel empowered when they vote.

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

#146

Post by wesammikhail »

kick wrote: post #141
com2kid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nestle poisons entire cities and has killed thousands of babies. Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did. The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_... Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems. First World problems are a subset of this fallacy. Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.

Start by defining evil... Or are we supposed to take your subjective categorization as an objective standard?

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

#147

Post by Avamander »

salty_biscuits wrote: post #120
nitrogen wrote: post #88

Would we encourage an epidemiologist to apply ‘fresh thinking’ to the design of an electrical substation? Yes, absolutely. If an epidemiologist identifies and models a trend in human disease around substations, or a trend in failures of substations, or a new way of modeling the ways electrical demand can change over time and influence demand in other times and places, etc., then their input should absolutely be consi…

That rubbed me up the wrong way too. Applied mathematics is really quite transferable across disciplines, you just usually don't have the domain knowledge to stop you chasing dead ends or reinventing the wheel.

Not to mention that sometimes experts in their fields miss common knowledge in other areas. Like the biologist that reinvented integration, Riemann sum - http://care.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/1... (https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...).

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

#148

Post by zentiggr »

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…

I think the question that needs to be answered before that is "how do you get people to want to be better informed".

If that was already true, there never would have been an Enquirer or Weekly World News.

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

#149

Post by perl4ever »

sah2ed wrote: post #114
perl4ever wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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. Your expectation that the media should inform people is reasonable but unrealistic. The original designers had fairly specific design goals in mind and it did not explicitly include “to inform”…

"Your expectation"

I wrote "should"; I am not predicting in my comment that that the media will inform people [more] in the future; therefore calling my "expectation" unrealistic is uncalled for.

Referring to "the original designers" is confusing to me. You seem to be implying that "the media" was designed by some person or entity as a monolith, which is a theory that is unfamiliar to me and not mainstream (that I'm aware of).

Also, you seem to be positing that "the media" was not only created as a monolith but is controlled as one today, since you say that it can only be worked around or replaced. It really seems like a heterodox and far out theory, that "the media" is not subject to to change. Perhaps you could elaborate, since I thought the discussion was about recent changes to the media?

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

#150

Post by justanotherc »

strenholme wrote: post #136

I am working on trying to make an accurate model for predicting COVID-19 growth based on the per-county figures we have with COVID-19 (courtesy The New York Times). To say the data is noisy would be an understatement. What I have found, so far, is that if we look at current daily growth (averaged over seven days) and use exponentiation to predict future growth based on the previous week’s figures, the numbers are too…

It could only be exponential if the population was infinite. It has to be more of a bell curve, because as infection grows, there are fewer hosts to infect, and therefore growth would start to decline.
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