31–40 of 116 posts
Consider this set of statistics: 90% of elementary school teachers are female [1]. 90% of veterans are male [2]. Unsurprising. But, there are 2 million female veterans in the US, and only 1.7 million female elementary school teachers. That means if you talk to a random American female, it is more likely that she is a veteran than an elementary school teacher. I think a lot of disagreements on Hacker News and elsewher…
Been noted here on HN: the average web form excludes lots of people. Lots of folks cant fill in: First/middle/last name; unique username/password; social security number; street address; bank account. And not just folks in Micronesia or whatever. Heck my business partner hasn't got a deliverable street address - no mailbox at his house. He has a PO box. Is a nightmare getting Amazon deliveries that aren't lost, or le…
This interesting but all a bit wordy and meandering. Tldr: The air force was using the average dimensions of their pilots to design aircraft. Coincident to this, there was a large number of downed planes questionably attributed to "pilot error" but that many believed to be from an unknown cause. A recruit from Harvard charged with collecting data on pilots realized few people were close to the average, and recommendi…
I know. Isn't that wonderful?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think so. They also said: > Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size ... less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions.
FTA: ”These formed the dimensions of the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 per cent of the range of values for each dimension.“ 0.3³ = 0.0027 = 2.7%, so if those measurements are independent of each other, it isn’t surprising that he found “less than 3.5 percent”.
[0] With 4000 subjects they presumably have all sizes within ~3.5 stddevs represented. The middle ~1.2 stddevs should hold ~77% of the population. 0.77^3 = ~46%
To construct this archetype, they used the mode of various dimensions rather than the median or average.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/28/755191639/episode-936-the-mod...
I remember when this idea came around Hacker News the last time. I mentioned this over lunch, and one of my (highly respected and deservedly considered intelligent) younger coworkers called BS on it. His object was: "Why would a government build an expensive, high tech piece of equipment, then not ensure it could fit the operator?" He just couldn't imagine it. Between 2020 and WWII, there is a huge difference in avai…
Our technology also continued to evolve throughout the war, updated fighters, better engines, even whole new designs. The Germans as far as mass produced designs went were effectively frozen in 1939. A lot of this was the complete inefficiency of the Reich Air Ministry at project management, as well as the political supremacy of the Heer over the Luftwaffe. In addition to the political whims of a dictatorship (Techno…
Well, not completely. "Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles" has a nice video on, "Why was the BF109K faster than the P51D? MW 50!" So to try and compensate for only having lower octane fuel, German engineers in WWII went to water/methanol injection for emergency power. Things did go back and forth quite a bit. Granted, the BF109 was one of the most advanced late 1930's designs going up against 1940's allied wartime designs. But there were times when updates on older designs would outclass the other sides slightly older versions, and this happened repeatedly on both sides.
Technological choices were often driven by ideology, and perception, much more than in the other dictatorship at the time
"Yes, but can it dive bomb?" probably did about as much to compromise designs of Nazi fighter/interceptors and slow the release of new airplanes as espionage and sabotage by the allies!
I remember when this idea came around Hacker News the last time. I mentioned this over lunch, and one of my (highly respected and deservedly considered intelligent) younger coworkers called BS on it. His object was: "Why would a government build an expensive, high tech piece of equipment, then not ensure it could fit the operator?" He just couldn't imagine it. Between 2020 and WWII, there is a huge difference in avai…
Our technology also continued to evolve throughout the war, updated fighters, better engines, even whole new designs. The Germans as far as mass produced designs went were effectively frozen in 1939. A lot of this was the complete inefficiency of the Reich Air Ministry at project management, as well as the political supremacy of the Heer over the Luftwaffe. In addition to the political whims of a dictatorship (Techno…
I'm just saying, don't get carried away with the technological superiority argument, there was plenty of innovation on both sides. After all, the engineer that designed the Apollo rocket was a Nazi weapons scientist.
Consider this set of statistics: 90% of elementary school teachers are female [1]. 90% of veterans are male [2]. Unsurprising. But, there are 2 million female veterans in the US, and only 1.7 million female elementary school teachers. That means if you talk to a random American female, it is more likely that she is a veteran than an elementary school teacher. I think a lot of disagreements on Hacker News and elsewher…
Enter bayes theorem
Been noted here on HN: the average web form excludes lots of people. Lots of folks cant fill in: First/middle/last name; unique username/password; social security number; street address; bank account. And not just folks in Micronesia or whatever. Heck my business partner hasn't got a deliverable street address - no mailbox at his house. He has a PO box. Is a nightmare getting Amazon deliveries that aren't lost, or le…
The name field situation has never bothered me as a typical American with the standard name format, but as I've grown and met people from different cultures I've learned just how frustrating that part of forms can be. Even (or rather, especially?) government forms are terrible about this.
Consider this set of statistics: 90% of elementary school teachers are female [1]. 90% of veterans are male [2]. Unsurprising. But, there are 2 million female veterans in the US, and only 1.7 million female elementary school teachers. That means if you talk to a random American female, it is more likely that she is a veteran than an elementary school teacher. I think a lot of disagreements on Hacker News and elsewher…
I don't understand your point here. Is it that somehow, some people are more than 10% likely to run into the 10%? Well, that's obvious. Roughly speaking, you'd expect 10% of commenters to be in that 10%, unless we're talking about something that disproportionately does or does not affect people interested in technologies, startups, etc..