neuralgraffiti

No seriously, I felt the p-values, in my soul…

…gamblers are convinced that they have “runs of luck”; we can take a perfectly cheerful heavy metal record, play it backwards, and hear hidden messages about satan. Our ability to spot patterns is what allows us to make sense of the world but sometimes, in our eagerness, we can mistakenly spot patterns where none exist . . . . Intuitions are great shortcuts. They’re very valuable for lots of things in the social domain: deciding if your girlfriend is cheating on you, perhaps, or whether a business partner is trustworthy. But for mathematical issues, or assessing causal relationships, intuitions suffer from inaccuracies, misfires, and oversensitivity. The challenge, perhaps, is to work out which tools to use where: because trying to be “scientific” about your relationship is as stupid as following an intuition about the risks and benefits of a treatment.