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Mathematical Jargon Failures

blog.plover.com

11–20 of 77 posts

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#11
post #4

The Type I and Type II errors is especially hurtful to me: I am totally unable to remember which is which and each time I read an article containing them I think: well, I am probably going to get it wrong again but I cannot bother to check the definition one more time... who cares?

The concepts and numbers and letters describing them are perfectly ordered.

  H0        H1
  alpha     beta
  Type I    Type II 
Because error is negation of truth, you get H1 result with Type I error.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#12
post #5
post #4

The Type I and Type II errors is especially hurtful to me: I am totally unable to remember which is which and each time I read an article containing them I think: well, I am probably going to get it wrong again but I cannot bother to check the definition one more time... who cares?

In particular when one could just call them "false acceptance of null" and "false rejection of null", and abbreviate it to FAN and FRN, or so. How hard is that.

False {posi,nega}tive Type II? error

just 2 chars...........

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#15
post #8
post #2

The referenced article, https://blog.plover.com/lang/jargon-failures.html , on jargon failures is a nice read as well!

IT is full of jargon as well. Where else would it make sense to cherry-pick commits into a branch and then ask others to pull that branch into their repository? :) My German team has a running gag where, when a sentence turns out especially jargon-riddled, we translate all the jargon words into German, as literally as possible. The result is always hilarious.

Sometimes IT and biology share some jargon, or at least they share the words but not exactly the meaning.

Both in IT and biology a collection of trees is called a forest. In IT, if you take a tree and remove the root, the result is a forest. Biologists don't agree.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#16
post #11
post #4

The Type I and Type II errors is especially hurtful to me: I am totally unable to remember which is which and each time I read an article containing them I think: well, I am probably going to get it wrong again but I cannot bother to check the definition one more time... who cares?

The concepts and numbers and letters describing them are perfectly ordered. H0 H1 alpha beta Type I Type II Because error is negation of truth, you get H1 result with Type I error.

You say this as though it were helpful.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT is full of jargon as well. Where else would it make sense to cherry-pick commits into a branch and then ask others to pull that branch into their repository? :) My German team has a running gag where, when a sentence turns out especially jargon-riddled, we translate all the jargon words into German, as literally as possible. The result is always hilarious.

Sometimes IT and biology share some jargon, or at least they share the words but not exactly the meaning. Both in IT and biology a collection of trees is called a forest. In IT, if you take a tree and remove the root, the result is a forest. Biologists don't agree.

Well, the biological angle kind of makes sense if you think of it as taking the branches from a big tree, without the roots and successfully planting them in the ground individually. It doesn't quite work that way in practice, but if it did, you would get a small forest.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#18
post #11
post #4

The Type I and Type II errors is especially hurtful to me: I am totally unable to remember which is which and each time I read an article containing them I think: well, I am probably going to get it wrong again but I cannot bother to check the definition one more time... who cares?

The concepts and numbers and letters describing them are perfectly ordered. H0 H1 alpha beta Type I Type II Because error is negation of truth, you get H1 result with Type I error.

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