Maybe because there's not too many of them around anymore.
You're missing the point, Mac. Most of the human race is partly of Neanderthal stock. Ipso facto, there's plenty of us still around.
True. But they lost most of their turf, geographic and genetic to newcomers.
One can argue that birds are dinosaurs that are doing well today. But the other side of the coin is that dinosaurs were amazingly diverse in the past, and only held on in a tiny, tiny number of niches.
That there was a massive decline for the neanderthals and the dinosaurs would be undeniable.
The problem is the education system, that doesn't teach even basic numerical reasoning to people who need to use it all the time.
I wouldn't call the Base rate fallacy basic numerical reasoning. I didn't learn about baysean probability until my senior year, and I didn't hear about the base rate fallacy until I was a researcher.
You may be correct that perhaps it is too much to ask of the general populace. But we are not talking about the general populace.
Base rate fallacy should be trivial information to any profession that employs fingerprinting, such as law enforcement. Partial print matches are a common occurrence in crime scene investigations. There is no excuse here.
If the 99.99% figure is apparently misleading, and if the 99.99% figure is apparently the only one that the politicians look at, stop presenting the 99.99% figure!!!
If the company does not present the 99.99% number with an explanation, then a competitor who sells 99.97% with a smile will get the sale instead.
Much better. But that is not quite correct either.
The job of QA is demonstrate, with concrete evidence, that a product brings value to customers in an understandable and predictable manner. It is a business decision whether the right customers will be happy enough.
As a practical matter, testing is important. But theoretically speaking, whether QA tests a little, a lot, or at all should be determined on a case by case basis.
I do agree wholehearted with your sentiment. An engineer who throws code over the wall in order to find out if his work doesn't suck is an engineer who is pathologically disinterested in being competent.
Just as much as the public has grown to distrust the police, the police as well have grown to distrust the public. Everyone is a potential enemy
The next generation of police are going have to learn to see cameras as a fact of life, and behave as if a grainy vision of everything they do could see the inside of a courtroom. Usually cameras help the police. Sometimes they raise inconvenient questions.
No one has any expectation of privacy in a public place, or anything that can easily be viewed or heard by a passerby who is in a public place at the time.
Most doctors already habitually guess the most obvious seeming diagnosis, and avoid further applying their brain. Watson will do no worse there. Watson may actually do much better.
What is important is how other reasonable hypotheses are handled, and how the doctor and patient and Watson work together to look at contra-indications and consider further tests. The potential for improvement here is vast, for all but the most superb doctors.
The other important result of a Doctor-Watson pairing is that the doctor will have to openly admit that he or she is making an educated guess, and that there is often a non-trivial chance that the first attempted course of treatment is outright wrong.
The majority of doctors are a lot less smart than they or the general public want to believe. They are biased towards assuming the statistically most likely cause is surely the cause. While that is not an unreasonable starting point, the problem comes in is how the doctor's personal buy in regarding the initial diagnosis clouds his or her ability to perceive contra-indications.
I have personally seen that it is not even uncommon for doctors to assume that a patient that is in pain and not responding positively to the initial treatment is a liar.
Patients in pain have a weird way of being emotional. And it is awfully rude of 10-20% of the patients to fail to thrive under the doctor's wonderful 80-90% accurate diagnosis. A cold-hearted computer could be a big positive here. "Um, it says there is a 6% chance that it is Y instead of X. Since the drug for X seems to be no great shakes for me, how do we tell it is Y instead, doctor?"
Your reasoning has merit, but it only applies if one blindly assumes "college education (both in time and money) is almost certain to pay off in the long run".
The payoff has never actually been automatic. It was very close to being automatic decades ago. It was usually, but not always, a correct sentiment in the recent past.
The answer lies in recognizing that one should leave college able to build a resume that includes some bullet items attractive to prospective employers, and not assume that the wonderfulness of your degrees will be good enough. The crappy "I have a degree" plan worked well enough for me, in fact, but I would not recommend such for the 21st century. (I had the benefit of hard science degrees from top universities.)
There is still much time in college to begin the journey towards becoming a well-rounded person. Alas, college is far too expensive now for the luxury of believing that that alone is sufficient, and assumning stuff like having a plausible career plan can wait until after graduation.
BTW, I do think it is plausible that people who are great self-starters can manage by skipping college. But such people were probably already obviously that personality type at age 15. Going to college is the sub-optimal route for some people. Not going to college is the sub-optimal route for some others.
I can't even read Shakespeare without having to sit and think on every page for about an hour
Cheer up. The medium is the problem.
The primary reason you cannot read Shakespeare is because Shakespeare himself never intended for you to try and read his work like a novel. And I believe most (all?) of his sonnets were intended for private consumption, with a specific individual in mind for whom those words would easily land.
Shakespeare created plays, which would entail dialogue that would be interpreted by a professional actors under the direction of someone who understood the material, probably Shakespeare himself.
You did not really read the play. You read the script. The script is the dialogue itself, virtually bereft of the stage direction that Shakespeare himself would have provided in person to a group of professional performers.
The bottom line is that Shakespeare is hard to read because it was not meant to be read. Professional actors read and re-read scripts many, many times before they understand them well enough to attempt to create a play from them. One should not expect the effort to be less for you, just because you are sitting alone in a comfy chair with a college degree under you belt.
(In fact, it might be a lot easier if you and a few friends tried to read it aloud, and figure out what it meant together.)
Re:expecting quality from the movie, you ask too m
on
X-Men: First Class
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· Score: 1
The Scouring of the Shire was a significant loss (but a useful, albeit harsh, choice). How the army of the dead was employed was not my favorite, but I understand how it usefully simplified the movie.
Bombadil is just a distraction. His is a wonderful side-trip into the vestigial ancient "fairie" foundations of Middle Earth, but it was properly removed for the movie.
Whether Gandalf is a match for the Witch King in a straight fight is not thematically important. In the Big Picture, his primary role is to inspire heroism and rally Men to their destiny, not solve the big problems with a sword.
I was impressed how the films highlight the nature of the temptations of both Boromir and Saruman in a very human way, and their fall. Emphasizing Gandalf's fear of Moria helps there. But it also true that such fear is actually subtly implied in the source material, otherwise one has to wonder why a ranger and a wizard are so stupid as to almost get the halflings killed in a failed trek over the mountain range. Are they both incompetent, or was it a reckless choice justified for other reasons?
The researcher is just throwing together a bunch of problems that have existed, in some fashion, for a very long time, and concludes with open questions rather than even vague proposals for solutions. So I would say this article is both too detailed, and not detailed enough.
Most such "Cons" are made by 100% sincere people, who delude themselves into believing their simplistic solutions have value in addressing big and complex problems.
The money can be a factor. But much less than you might think. Lucrative foolishness just happens to be guaranteed to spawn many, many imitators. That is not necessarily a sign of greed. It is at least as much a symptom of people who are often loathe to ever question apparent material success.
It actually makes perfect sense to take Einhorn's opinion at face value, as one sincere, informed opinion on a complex topic.
The P/E ratio is so low on Microsoft that it is an okay buy with zero prospects for new lines of business. A contrarian-minded value buyer loves this kind of stock. The likelihood of the stock dropping further is very low, while the upside potential of a happy accident is huge.
Getting rid of Ballmer could well precipitate a happy accident. Frankly, any merely competent CEO is not likely to do worse than Balmer in the eyes of the stock market.
We are not talking about a bogus speeding ticket for driving 56 in a 55 zone, which is rare in most locales, merely annoying, and involves a trivial fine. People whose lifestyle involves criminal activity or hanging out with those who are criminals would like to believe that it is "bad luck", and not their own behavior, that got them where they are in life. Boo. Hoo.
People who make a positive habit of staying well away from crime very, very rarely have this kind of "bad luck". The exceptions would be a few labor organizers or other civil rights activists, who seek out opportunities to step on the toes of the powerful. While most such persons are laudable, they are obviously outliers that have little to do with what you are insinuating about our legal system.
Your underlying logic has merit, but it cuts both ways.
Your typical highly competent engineer does not cost the salary per year. Once you add in SSI matching, benefits, other HR/management overhead, and physical facilities, it is likely the true cost is at least 1.5X the nominal wage. It would not be surprising if reality were closer to 2X nominal wage.
So, your $200 monitor really costs $350? Well, your 100k engineer really costs 175k. The math still comes out about the same.
To give a concrete example of why I think "efficiency" is phony, if put our brains in a PET scanner, many of us here would be extremely efficient about multiplying 16 times 16, just because we would immediately recognize the logical connection to common hexadecimal manipulations and thus find the shortcut.
But someone never worked with hexadecimal would have to do more work. Their brains might look relatively less efficient when objectively measured by the metabolic activity in the brain required to come to the correct answer.
"Efficiency" more likely has all the classic deficiencies of typical "intelligences tests".
"More efficient brain connections" boils down to a pseudo-scientific way of saying "intelligence" (which itself is painfully nebulous). When someone has to resort to new terminology that implies objective measures that probably do not exist, it is because they are trying too hard to sell weak science.
How does one measure "efficiency" in an objective manner? Even defining this concept could take a thousand PhD theses.
Right. But with how many insurance companies do you insure the same car, in case the first turns out to be criminally incompetent? And do you keep a ship-shape spare copy of your original car in the garage, just in case?
This was a distributed, collaborative effort, with the copy of record constantly changing in small ways. It was perfectly reasonable to ask a professional to take care of the back up, and expect to never lose more than a week's worth of work in the worst case scenario.
This will never see the inside of a court, because the ISP would simply lose. They were paid for a critical service that they chose not to perform.
"Justice delayed is justice denied." If it is very expensive and time consuming, then it is quite likely to never be right, just, and proper to anyone who lacks a 8-figure legal war chest. The theoretical superior justness of a certain methodology is only relevant if you can run the entire marathon with the big corporation or troll, prevail in the eyes of the judge, and still be standing to demand redress.
My own employer has been sued by an 8000-lb. gorilla of a competitor, who is abusing the legal system to try and squash an upstart in the field. In spite of the merits of the suit being so weak that the patents in question are likely to be overturned completely in court, this will probably cost my employer >$10 million in lawyers' fees and take >9 years to resolve.
To a weaker company, lack of judicial speed can kill.
Plame's name was dropped in front of Richard Armitage and others, under ambiguous circumstances. Libby and close associates of his were in the center of these "accidents". When the prosecutors tracked down the leaks to a specific timeline, and questioned Libby about key related conversations, from the investigator's POV, Libby appeared to fabricate an alibi from whole cloth.
So the circumstances strongly suggested that this "mistaken" recollection was not innocent.
And the jury all agreed. I would note that multiple jurors stated they believed Libby was a "Fall Guy".
There are two kinds of Fall Guy. There is the complete innocent who is framed on purpose or through bad luck, which is vastly more common in fiction than real life. And there is the very guilty Fall Guy, who is left holding the bag while more morally culpable individuals escape justice.
It is unambiguous the jurors were thinking of the second kind, which, if taken at face value, implies they believed there must have been a criminal conspiracy within the highest levels of government.
On the other hand... it is sure "funny" how we constantly talk about troubled kids; and how teachers need put on their cape, chalk an "S" on their chest, and fly to save them...but the parents themselves are not within the topic of discussion.
In fact, I would say that the norm is for conceptual knowledge to be accessible by narrative form only, at least at first, only to be replaced more accurate schematics after more extensive experience and in depth study of the topic, if ever. (e.g. "Mister Sodium has an extra electron outside his complete shell; So by lending it to Miss Chlorine, she complete her outer shell, and they are both happier.")
So it is not just a coincidence that people are easily influenced by stories, because they do not ever think about hard topics outside their field of expertise as something other than a narrative that sounds good.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point, Mac. Most of the human race is partly of Neanderthal stock. Ipso facto, there's plenty of us still around.
True. But they lost most of their turf, geographic and genetic to newcomers.
One can argue that birds are dinosaurs that are doing well today. But the other side of the coin is that dinosaurs were amazingly diverse in the past, and only held on in a tiny, tiny number of niches.
That there was a massive decline for the neanderthals and the dinosaurs would be undeniable.
I wouldn't call the Base rate fallacy basic numerical reasoning. I didn't learn about baysean probability until my senior year, and I didn't hear about the base rate fallacy until I was a researcher.
You may be correct that perhaps it is too much to ask of the general populace. But we are not talking about the general populace.
Base rate fallacy should be trivial information to any profession that employs fingerprinting, such as law enforcement. Partial print matches are a common occurrence in crime scene investigations. There is no excuse here.
If the 99.99% figure is apparently misleading, and if the 99.99% figure is apparently the only one that the politicians look at, stop presenting the 99.99% figure!!!
If the company does not present the 99.99% number with an explanation, then a competitor who sells 99.97% with a smile will get the sale instead.
Much better. But that is not quite correct either.
The job of QA is demonstrate, with concrete evidence, that a product brings value to customers in an understandable and predictable manner. It is a business decision whether the right customers will be happy enough.
As a practical matter, testing is important. But theoretically speaking, whether QA tests a little, a lot, or at all should be determined on a case by case basis.
I do agree wholehearted with your sentiment. An engineer who throws code over the wall in order to find out if his work doesn't suck is an engineer who is pathologically disinterested in being competent.
Just as much as the public has grown to distrust the police, the police as well have grown to distrust the public. Everyone is a potential enemy
The next generation of police are going have to learn to see cameras as a fact of life, and behave as if a grainy vision of everything they do could see the inside of a courtroom. Usually cameras help the police. Sometimes they raise inconvenient questions.
No one has any expectation of privacy in a public place, or anything that can easily be viewed or heard by a passerby who is in a public place at the time.
Most doctors already habitually guess the most obvious seeming diagnosis, and avoid further applying their brain. Watson will do no worse there. Watson may actually do much better.
What is important is how other reasonable hypotheses are handled, and how the doctor and patient and Watson work together to look at contra-indications and consider further tests. The potential for improvement here is vast, for all but the most superb doctors.
The other important result of a Doctor-Watson pairing is that the doctor will have to openly admit that he or she is making an educated guess, and that there is often a non-trivial chance that the first attempted course of treatment is outright wrong.
The majority of doctors are a lot less smart than they or the general public want to believe. They are biased towards assuming the statistically most likely cause is surely the cause. While that is not an unreasonable starting point, the problem comes in is how the doctor's personal buy in regarding the initial diagnosis clouds his or her ability to perceive contra-indications.
I have personally seen that it is not even uncommon for doctors to assume that a patient that is in pain and not responding positively to the initial treatment is a liar.
Patients in pain have a weird way of being emotional. And it is awfully rude of 10-20% of the patients to fail to thrive under the doctor's wonderful 80-90% accurate diagnosis. A cold-hearted computer could be a big positive here. "Um, it says there is a 6% chance that it is Y instead of X. Since the drug for X seems to be no great shakes for me, how do we tell it is Y instead, doctor?"
Well, the famous counterexamples were generally ferociously driven persons at all ages.
I agree that college is not a magic wand that turns frogs into princes. It gives frogs tools that can help them turn themselves into princes.
Some frogs can build the tools on their own.
Joseph Campbell has two degrees from top universities BTW.
Your reasoning has merit, but it only applies if one blindly assumes "college education (both in time and money) is almost certain to pay off in the long run".
The payoff has never actually been automatic. It was very close to being automatic decades ago. It was usually, but not always, a correct sentiment in the recent past.
The answer lies in recognizing that one should leave college able to build a resume that includes some bullet items attractive to prospective employers, and not assume that the wonderfulness of your degrees will be good enough. The crappy "I have a degree" plan worked well enough for me, in fact, but I would not recommend such for the 21st century. (I had the benefit of hard science degrees from top universities.)
There is still much time in college to begin the journey towards becoming a well-rounded person. Alas, college is far too expensive now for the luxury of believing that that alone is sufficient, and assumning stuff like having a plausible career plan can wait until after graduation.
BTW, I do think it is plausible that people who are great self-starters can manage by skipping college. But such people were probably already obviously that personality type at age 15. Going to college is the sub-optimal route for some people. Not going to college is the sub-optimal route for some others.
I can't even read Shakespeare without having to sit and think on every page for about an hour
Cheer up. The medium is the problem.
The primary reason you cannot read Shakespeare is because Shakespeare himself never intended for you to try and read his work like a novel. And I believe most (all?) of his sonnets were intended for private consumption, with a specific individual in mind for whom those words would easily land.
Shakespeare created plays, which would entail dialogue that would be interpreted by a professional actors under the direction of someone who understood the material, probably Shakespeare himself.
You did not really read the play. You read the script. The script is the dialogue itself, virtually bereft of the stage direction that Shakespeare himself would have provided in person to a group of professional performers.
The bottom line is that Shakespeare is hard to read because it was not meant to be read. Professional actors read and re-read scripts many, many times before they understand them well enough to attempt to create a play from them. One should not expect the effort to be less for you, just because you are sitting alone in a comfy chair with a college degree under you belt.
(In fact, it might be a lot easier if you and a few friends tried to read it aloud, and figure out what it meant together.)
The Scouring of the Shire was a significant loss (but a useful, albeit harsh, choice). How the army of the dead was employed was not my favorite, but I understand how it usefully simplified the movie.
Bombadil is just a distraction. His is a wonderful side-trip into the vestigial ancient "fairie" foundations of Middle Earth, but it was properly removed for the movie.
Whether Gandalf is a match for the Witch King in a straight fight is not thematically important. In the Big Picture, his primary role is to inspire heroism and rally Men to their destiny, not solve the big problems with a sword.
I was impressed how the films highlight the nature of the temptations of both Boromir and Saruman in a very human way, and their fall. Emphasizing Gandalf's fear of Moria helps there. But it also true that such fear is actually subtly implied in the source material, otherwise one has to wonder why a ranger and a wizard are so stupid as to almost get the halflings killed in a failed trek over the mountain range. Are they both incompetent, or was it a reckless choice justified for other reasons?
The researcher is just throwing together a bunch of problems that have existed, in some fashion, for a very long time, and concludes with open questions rather than even vague proposals for solutions. So I would say this article is both too detailed, and not detailed enough.
Most such "Cons" are made by 100% sincere people, who delude themselves into believing their simplistic solutions have value in addressing big and complex problems.
The money can be a factor. But much less than you might think. Lucrative foolishness just happens to be guaranteed to spawn many, many imitators. That is not necessarily a sign of greed. It is at least as much a symptom of people who are often loathe to ever question apparent material success.
It actually makes perfect sense to take Einhorn's opinion at face value, as one sincere, informed opinion on a complex topic.
The P/E ratio is so low on Microsoft that it is an okay buy with zero prospects for new lines of business. A contrarian-minded value buyer loves this kind of stock. The likelihood of the stock dropping further is very low, while the upside potential of a happy accident is huge.
Getting rid of Ballmer could well precipitate a happy accident. Frankly, any merely competent CEO is not likely to do worse than Balmer in the eyes of the stock market.
Shenanigans.
We are not talking about a bogus speeding ticket for driving 56 in a 55 zone, which is rare in most locales, merely annoying, and involves a trivial fine. People whose lifestyle involves criminal activity or hanging out with those who are criminals would like to believe that it is "bad luck", and not their own behavior, that got them where they are in life. Boo. Hoo.
People who make a positive habit of staying well away from crime very, very rarely have this kind of "bad luck". The exceptions would be a few labor organizers or other civil rights activists, who seek out opportunities to step on the toes of the powerful. While most such persons are laudable, they are obviously outliers that have little to do with what you are insinuating about our legal system.
Your underlying logic has merit, but it cuts both ways.
Your typical highly competent engineer does not cost the salary per year. Once you add in SSI matching, benefits, other HR/management overhead, and physical facilities, it is likely the true cost is at least 1.5X the nominal wage. It would not be surprising if reality were closer to 2X nominal wage.
So, your $200 monitor really costs $350? Well, your 100k engineer really costs 175k. The math still comes out about the same.
To give a concrete example of why I think "efficiency" is phony, if put our brains in a PET scanner, many of us here would be extremely efficient about multiplying 16 times 16, just because we would immediately recognize the logical connection to common hexadecimal manipulations and thus find the shortcut.
But someone never worked with hexadecimal would have to do more work. Their brains might look relatively less efficient when objectively measured by the metabolic activity in the brain required to come to the correct answer.
"Efficiency" more likely has all the classic deficiencies of typical "intelligences tests".
I agree with your skepticism, and then some.
"More efficient brain connections" boils down to a pseudo-scientific way of saying "intelligence" (which itself is painfully nebulous). When someone has to resort to new terminology that implies objective measures that probably do not exist, it is because they are trying too hard to sell weak science.
How does one measure "efficiency" in an objective manner? Even defining this concept could take a thousand PhD theses.
Not only it is possible, but just three grandparents would help explain why so many of his relatives are stuck in the trailer park.
Right. But with how many insurance companies do you insure the same car, in case the first turns out to be criminally incompetent? And do you keep a ship-shape spare copy of your original car in the garage, just in case?
This was a distributed, collaborative effort, with the copy of record constantly changing in small ways. It was perfectly reasonable to ask a professional to take care of the back up, and expect to never lose more than a week's worth of work in the worst case scenario.
This will never see the inside of a court, because the ISP would simply lose. They were paid for a critical service that they chose not to perform.
"Justice delayed is justice denied." If it is very expensive and time consuming, then it is quite likely to never be right, just, and proper to anyone who lacks a 8-figure legal war chest. The theoretical superior justness of a certain methodology is only relevant if you can run the entire marathon with the big corporation or troll, prevail in the eyes of the judge, and still be standing to demand redress.
My own employer has been sued by an 8000-lb. gorilla of a competitor, who is abusing the legal system to try and squash an upstart in the field. In spite of the merits of the suit being so weak that the patents in question are likely to be overturned completely in court, this will probably cost my employer >$10 million in lawyers' fees and take >9 years to resolve.
To a weaker company, lack of judicial speed can kill.
Plame's name was dropped in front of Richard Armitage and others, under ambiguous circumstances. Libby and close associates of his were in the center of these "accidents". When the prosecutors tracked down the leaks to a specific timeline, and questioned Libby about key related conversations, from the investigator's POV, Libby appeared to fabricate an alibi from whole cloth.
So the circumstances strongly suggested that this "mistaken" recollection was not innocent.
And the jury all agreed. I would note that multiple jurors stated they believed Libby was a "Fall Guy".
There are two kinds of Fall Guy. There is the complete innocent who is framed on purpose or through bad luck, which is vastly more common in fiction than real life. And there is the very guilty Fall Guy, who is left holding the bag while more morally culpable individuals escape justice.
It is unambiguous the jurors were thinking of the second kind, which, if taken at face value, implies they believed there must have been a criminal conspiracy within the highest levels of government.
To be fair, your points all make sense.
On the other hand... it is sure "funny" how we constantly talk about troubled kids; and how teachers need put on their cape, chalk an "S" on their chest, and fly to save them...but the parents themselves are not within the topic of discussion.
In fact, I would say that the norm is for conceptual knowledge to be accessible by narrative form only, at least at first, only to be replaced more accurate schematics after more extensive experience and in depth study of the topic, if ever. (e.g. "Mister Sodium has an extra electron outside his complete shell; So by lending it to Miss Chlorine, she complete her outer shell, and they are both happier.")
So it is not just a coincidence that people are easily influenced by stories, because they do not ever think about hard topics outside their field of expertise as something other than a narrative that sounds good.