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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

#91

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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 them they have acute bronchitis, suddenly they feel empowered.

In the The Imaginary Invalid (17th century) Molliere makes fun of it. Doctor explains how opium works through its "dormitive virtue."

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

#92

Post by sbierwagen »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #65
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 journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so. In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?

>In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending,

Can be. Among others, Matthew Walker still has a job. https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure...

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

#93

Post by kick »

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.

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.

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

#94

Post by rytill »

sah2ed wrote: post #90
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. 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…

> POSIWID

Can we either make a reasonable-sounding word or phrase that means the thing or just say the thing? Who is going around really saying “POSIWID”?

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

#95

Post by alharith »

parasubvert wrote: post #80
alharith wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the deficiencies of major news organizations have ever been as blindingly obvious to me as they have been over the past month. I knew it was bad. I didn’t realize exactly how bad it was. For them, even a national crisis is just an occasion to twist against Trump. Yes Trump is far, far, far from perfect, but there’s a huge difference between honest, factual reporting and these transparent efforts to use…

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.

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

#96

Post by perl4ever »

sah2ed wrote: post #90
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. 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 designed to inform by specific and aware human intention; if it informed as a side effect of being unoptimized for disinformation, then in that sense it was designed to inform.

By analogy, natural foods are not designed, in one sense, to keep you healthy, as evolution can make some things good for you and others bad.

...but the purpose of eating them is healthy nutrition, and if we started systematically only eating the toxic ones, then we would say something about our society is structured wrong for the purpose that we have of getting nutrition.

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

#97

Post by sgustard »

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…

I get why corrupt politicans hate the media, which is because it holds them accountable. Why do you choose to help them tear it down? Are we better off with no media and just the raw tweets of our leaders?

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

#98

Post by mattkrause »

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…

I'm not sure I agree.

While technically bronchitis could be any inflammation of the brochial tubes, a diagnosis of bronchitis usually means that that it's the patient's major problem. It'd be odd to describe a cancer as "bronchitis" even if it involved brochi. So you do learn something, in a Griceian sense, from the relatively uninformative diagnosis. There's also the implication that there are some tools for managing it, the doctor's seen it before, etc all of which are reassuring.

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

#99

Post by lonelappde »

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…

Thia isn't specific to news. It's everything in the marketplace. Anything for sale is optimized for short term profit -- lowest cost of production, highest impulse purchase pressure -- junk food, fake healthy food, furniture made of shoddy materials, shiny appliances that will break, etc.

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

#100

Post by thaumasiotes »

YZF wrote: post #21
smitty1e wrote: post #2

One feels that, irrespective of the models, the data in the covid-19 case may be unusually bad. It may be time to add a third error category[1] I. False positive II. False negative III. Deliberately skewed off the map for propaganda reasons. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors#Ty...

This is driving me crazy ;) the poor quality of data. You'd want health organizations around the world to be publishing every possible detail (anonymized) so that the disease can be better understood. Yet three months in, with over a million cases worldwide, we still have experts disagreeing about things like asymptomatic transmission, use of masks, droplets vs. aerosol, how much distance one should stand from anothe…

> You'd want health organizations around the world to be publishing every possible detail (anonymized)

If you're publishing every possible detail, then your data isn't anonymized. Anonymization consists of the removal of almost all of the details.

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