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   pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 22:11:02 JST pettter

   This is an excellent essay on our tendency to confuse language with intelligence: https://karawynn.substack.com/p/language-is-a-poor-heuristic-for

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     pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 22:17:37 JST pettter

     in reply to

     • Karawynn Long 🦊✍🏻🏳️‍🌈😷♿

     @karawynn Fun detail though:

     "In the late twentieth century, there was absolutely no need to double-check whether you TI-30 was accurately reporting the square root of seventeen."

     Probably not your TI-30, but there was a famous incident where square roots in particular were being incorrectly calculated by Microsoft Excel on certain Intel processors, so uh, yeah there's definitely a need to double check :)

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     pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 22:21:11 JST pettter

     in reply to

     • Karawynn Long 🦊✍🏻🏳️‍🌈😷♿

     @karawynn There's also the whole thing that if you're working with floating point numbers, some numbers are simply Not Going To Be What You Expect. There's no way to represent 0.6 in a standard floating point format, for example.

     So yeah, don't even trust computers to calculate correctly ;)

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     Fabian Transchel (ftranschel@norden.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Aug-2023 22:34:33 JST Fabian Transchel

     in reply to

     @pettter Excellent is an understatement.

     I was particularly struck by this thought:

     "You’re basically just shaking the Magic 8 Ball over again until (if you haven’t gotten frustrated and quit first) it randomly serves up an answer you like, at which point you stop asking."

     Ultimately (and as many people have already pointed out) this will lead to a wish-wash of regress-to-the-mean model that is no better than a horoscope oracle.