On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 12:03 AM, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > Was there a mistake in my math?
Let me expand a little more on this point, as obviously you feel putting calculations in your writing gives it some degree of rigor. The actual effect unfortunately is if anything the reverse. My father was a management consultant; one time he was advising a company that was doing its financial forecasting with a fancy Excel spreadsheet that was predicting they should have something like five million in the bank in a couple of years. "That's rubbish," said my father. "This is a small company operating on tight margins. There's no way it's going to end up with five million quid in the bank." "But it's right here in our spreadsheet output." "Then there must be a mistake in the spreadsheet. Go look for it." Sure enough they came back a couple of days later having found the error; the revised version said that with a bit of luck, the company might still be keeping its head above water in the years to come, forget about money in the bank. Now these were not stupid people. They had after all successfully run a company, not an easy thing to do. They would not normally have made that mistake. But the spreadsheet had created an emotional feeling of rigor that made them gullible. It had effectively become a tool of self-deception. That's what your calculations are doing. It's not just that they are useless GIGO (which they are). It's that by creating an emotional feeling of rigor, they are encouraging you to bullshit yourself into confusing story with real life. You would actually be better off dropping them. ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
