Kenneth Arrow and his statisticians found that their long-range forecasts were no better than numbers pulled out of a hat. The forecasters agreed and asked their superiors to be relieved of this duty. The reply was: "The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However he needs them for planning purposes."
There is a fairly compelling argument that divination in the ancient world was not a useless waste of time, as is commonly assumed, but that having either a process or a person that can make essentially random choices for them allowed people to make hard, consequential decisions where they might otherwise be paralyzed, especially when the penalty for not acting was worse than making a mistake.
Never thought of that. Probably a bit too generous given that it could be just as well waste of time and resources, nevermind the bias of the voodoo doctor. Most of it was just weirdly provided therapy I suppose to relieve stress.
But it is funny that humans put a great lot of weight on social contracts and being given explicit orders, maybe even publicly, must help pursuing action instead of rumination. Especially in a world where things seemed to happen randomly anyway.
Fascinating. I suppose it also encourages developing adaptable strategies that accommodate imperfect information, vs. succumbing to wishful thinking or other forms of cognitive bias.
Additionally, what has been the correct choice five years in a row might be catastrophically wrong in the sixth year. We need some randomness injected into our behaviour so that some people are always making "suboptimal" choices, to stop everyone from crowding into one local maximum and then getting swept away when the rare but inevitable flood comes along.
IIRC, the value of randomness went even further than that. I think it was in the allocation of land for rice paddies. I-ching was used to decide if any given farmer's land was to be used that year or something like that. The benefit wasn't divination selecting better land, but by way of random selection, gave an impersonal excuse to leave fields unplanted some years, which is beneficial in the long term to overall yield.
I think it was a stats class where I learned this, but as it turns out bad weather is less common than good weather. To be a fairly accurate weather person, you merely need to say "there will be no precipitation" and you'll be right like 90% of the time anywhere on earth.
What makes that funny is that historically, weather forecasters have been less than 90% accurate.
Now, I will say that today's weather models are pretty dang amazing. The 10 day forecast rarely wrong for me.
Take for example Chongqing, China which is one of the world's cloudiest and most overcast cities[1]. Easily confirmed by lack of cloudless satellite imagery.[2] You could get the forecast correct most of the time by just assuming it will be cloudy.
What is more interesting for meteorological forecasting is the time-sensitive details such as:
1. We know severe storms will impact city X at approximately Ypm tomorrow. Will it include large hailstones? Severe and destructive downdraft / tornado? What path will the most damage occur and how much notice can we provide those in the path, even if it's just 30min before the storm arrives?
2. Large wildfire breaks out near city X and is starting to form its own weather patterns.[3] What's the possible scenarios for fire tornadoes, lightning, etc to be formed and when/where? Will the wind direction change more likely happen at Ypm or Y+2pm?
I'm skeptical that AI models would excel in these areas because of the time sensitivity of input data as well as the general lack of accurate input data (impacting human analysis too).
Maybe AI models would be better than humans at making longer term climate predictions such as "If [particular type of ENSO/IOD/etc event] is occurring, the number of cloudy days in [city] is expected to be [quantity]/month in [month] versus [quantity2]/month if the event was not occurring." It's not that humans would be unable to arrive at these type of results -- just that it would be tedious and resource intensive to do so.
Mostly that might be down to micro climate and similar highly regional variation in weather.
Here in Berlin, predictions that it will rain or when it will rain are often too pessimistic because the city is a bit warmer and drier than the surrounding areas, which is where the airports are. Tegel, now closed is no the North West, Brandenburg airport is on the South East. They are about 20km apart. The long decommissioned Tempelhof is actually in the middle of the city but I doubt that there still is a weather station there.
Airports are the big consumers of, and important sources of weather data used for making predictions (in addition to satellite data, and weather stations elsewhere). It's more important that the predictions are correct there than 10-15 km away in the downtown areas.
Additionally, many weather apps aren't really precise about where their focus is. You set the city typically; not a postal code. So they'll predict it will rain in Berlin. But it's a big city and that doesn't mean it's going to rain everywhere in the city. It won't do neighborhood by neighborhood predictions. It's technically correct even if not a drop falls where you are. And of course professional users of weather predictions mainly care about the type of weather they need to plan for, which for airports is things like Thunderstorms, poor visibility, etc.
For short term planning, weather radar apps are popular here. Great stuff for guestimating whether you can get home by bike without getting caught up in a big shower. Thunderstorms are very common here throughout the summer but you can see the systems moving west to east hours in advance on the radar apps.
The Space Shuttle had weather constraints that meant it could launch on only about 30% of days. The issue was upper atmosphere winds, and if they weren't predicted accurately, it would result in overloads on the vehicle frame possibly sending it off course or becoming destroyed during ascent.
One of the major upgrades to the platform was to allow "day of use I-Loads." Effectively, they could update some constants in the shuttle software image, by literally patching new binary values into the code, while the vehicle was loaded and ready on the launch pad.
Then the game was to launch rockets to measure the upper atmosphere wind properties, convert them into usable constants, and then to update the software. It took the shuttle from having launch opportunities 30% of the time to having them 70% of the time later in the program.
I think this depends a lot on the region. I find that forecast quality differs widely from region to region. My guess is that it's a matter of (1) some regions have less advanced models available to them and (2) some regions have fundamentally more complex and unpredictable weather patterns.
Concrete if anecdotal example: weather forecast in SF are fairly accurate but the weather patterns are also simple to predict with the Pacific High and the simpler high level mechanics at play. Weather forecasts in Seoul are quite often completely wrong, but the weather patterns are also much more dynamics at a macro level with competing large systems in China/Gobi desert and the Western Pacific.
I'm not a meteorologist, just a sailor who likes to look at weather.
I think false negatives (i.e. it rains when it's not supposed to) are both more bothersome and noticeable, so your weather person won't be very popular.
I do this constantly. I have always assumed I was the only one, because if I were even kinda like other people, it'd be one of the quickest ways to destroy your own website.
Oh it's unconventional alright. When I see a link formatted as https://www.example.com/ and click it, the last thing I expect is for it to vanish and become "Copy Link | Visit website". Boggles my mind.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
For something to be unconventional, there needs to be the understanding of conventionality. The web is built on Hyperlinks and UI/UX are its languages of interaction, whose patterns have been learned throughout years. The big challenge in advancing that language is to not interrupt established patterns, so the interaction won't be perceived as broken. Turning a Hyperlink into a two-click experience is quite a statement, so people respond.
Besides, "amazing art stuff"? Please, it's an aggregator that links to experiments in interaction design.
But UX does not matter when experiencing art. OP is entitled to feel nit picky and pissy and a critic because of the normal way they experience the web. It does not mean his critique matters.
UX may not matter to you when experiencing art, but it certainly matters to me when experiencing art. A lack of care for whether or not the art is actually accessible to its audience makes it indistinguishable from the pretentious “avant garde” slop that exists primarily to allow “art dealers” to launder money.
Even worse, this website is less analogous to the art itself and more analogous to an art gallery, which means that now my perception of the art being showcased is now unfairly negative through no fault of the actual art on display. If I'm trying to view some painting at the Louvre only for the curator to jump in front of me and say “Wait! Do you really want to view that painting or do you want a notecard saying where it is?”, damn straight am I going to be annoyed as all hell at such antics, and it's going to ruin my experience through no fault of the actual artist.
... UX is the only thing that matters when experiencing art.
More to the point, though, in this case the art is purporting to be a functional website, so we're absolutely allowed to critique it on the grounds of being bad at that.
Exactly this. I hate to say it but this is the main reason I stopped coming to HN. I need some kind of, like, Marvin the Robot filter to make it so I can more easily avoid the tiny thoughts.
Yours is a very obnoxious comment; one that I agree with entirely. I'm happy for finding the website and like its content, but I do dislike that little feature. Leave links alone!
No one cares about the aggregated sum you spent, and something tells me that instead of directly saying how much the average user was paid, the PR team chose to divulge the total amount because it sounds better (someone must have pat themselves on the back when they phrased it as "we paid users $300K").
That’s a better ratio than I would have expected, but I would have led with that. The title as it is written reads as a bait and switch. I initially read it as: “We paid a plurality of users $300,000 each for all of their data.”
It’s probably obvious to most readers that this isn’t what happened ($300,000 would be an absurd price for someone’s camera roll), but it feels misleading. People respond to that kind of thing really negatively here, which is probably why your post got flagged.
Honest advice: free yourself from that and live a happier life. And I don't mean it in an "ignorance is bliss" kind of way, on the contrary really. Otherwise, to be consistent, you'd need to
- demand your salary be paid in salt
- have all arenas be covered in sand
- calculate only with pebbles
- only allow xylophones made of wood
And so on. It's a tiring journey to embark on -- oops, one can only embark on ships...
I have literally (and I mean literally as in literally, not just for emphasis) never heard anyone in common usage use decimate to mean "reduce by 10%".
Meanings change over time, and whenever this comes up it always just feels like some folks are adamant about the archaic usage just to (try to) show how smart they are.
Kenneth Arrow and his statisticians found that their long-range forecasts were no better than numbers pulled out of a hat. The forecasters agreed and asked their superiors to be relieved of this duty. The reply was: "The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However he needs them for planning purposes."