• 5 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 21 days ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2025

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  • But that’s just inconsistent with the state of of current scientific knowledge.

    Being poor makes you less likely to make a long term decision, not the other way around. In societies where income varies from season to season, you literally have less smokers when the money situation is good and more when the situation is bad. Long story short fighting for survival is extremely cognitively tasking. Thinking and planing is, literally, harder if you burned those resources on “what to put on the table… today”, problems.




  • You are describing Google Ads right now. Algorithms are better and better in reaching to poeple that are already on the purchase patch. It’s like giving a restaurant flayers to people that are waiting for a weiter to show them a table.

    Aren’t our ads amazing? Look, almost everyone who saw them made the purchase!

    Analytics that ignores Goodharts law ruin everything. Movies, HR, Marketing (not much to ruin left, but you get the point), performancet review, recommendations…





  • You seems to think the entire process is “our model is missing something, so we made up so shit it kind of works and call it a day”.

    In fact it’s A) our model is missing something B) it would work, if X was true, so to check if it could be valid… (And this part is crucial) C) …lets consider what else would be true if X was true. What else (from outside the model) can we measure? Would the result be different if X was true or flase? Let’s make predictions and see, see how well we did.

    It’s not A) The car stopped. Car that wouldn’t have gas would stop. Ergo we belive that car don’t have gas.

    It’s B) car have stopped. Car that wouldn’t have gas would have stop. If car don’t have gas, we would expect it to be lighter than cars with gas and we would expect a driver to go out with cannister and move in the direction of gas-station… and we weight the car, and look for a driver moving on foot. Only, once our predictions are confirmed we update our model.

    Is it 100% correct? No but it’s a systemic and reasonable aproch of moving model closer to the truth.