... only if their goal is to actually create a company that manufactures flying cars. If, however, their goal is to take a lot of people's money without giving them any legally recognized equity ownership or role in corporate governance, then I think that publicity is exactly what they need.

We should probably sue both Accuweather and NASA just to cover our bases.

I think it is more accurate to say that knowledge is not inherited. But interestingly the correction wouldn't change the veracity of your statement.

So then it is inflammable?

Worst apparent negative prefix ever.

I have to interject my $0.02 because I don't think you have seen through to the logical conclusion of your position. What if a group of people decided that they didn't like the rules of the government, so they begin to campaign against the entire government itself? Should they have the freedom to do that?

And when that proves unsuccessful, they start an armed revolt to change the government. Should they have the freedom to do that?

And when they are successful, they begin to rewrite every law in the book. Should they have the freedom to do that?

One of the laws that they add says that if you fire somebody because of a political contribution, they will imprison you or take your money. Should they have the freedom to do that? If not, why not? Shouldn't they have the freedom to not associate with people who would do that kind of firing?

It is impossible to say everyone should have the freedom to make whatever associations they want because every freedom granted is a limitation on somebody else's freedom to stop you from doing that thing. Re-read your Coase.

So instead of making an appeal to any particular fundamental right (which you won't be able to get everyone to agree to anyways), you need to get everyone to agree to a *process* for making the rules, and once everyone agrees to abide by the rules that are made through the proper process, then you follow that process and abide by the laws you like and go through the process to change the laws you don't. It's obvious that you disagree with this law, but do you have a much better way of making laws than the sort of representative democratic republic generally followed in the US (other than declaring RightSaidFred99 supreme monarch)? Not once in any of your comments have you mentioned that you felt that the law was improperly passed, merely that it is a bad law because it impinges on the freedom of people you would prefer to have freedom and gives freedom to people who you would prefer did not.

What I know is that the issues that you are trying to address, namely, exposure to an intervention vs. effectiveness of that intervention, is exactly what real researchers deal with all the time when they say something like "Telling people to eat less and exercise more is/is not an effective weight loss strategy." It's not hard to get appropriate metrics for it and interpret those metrics to make a conclusion like that if you know what you are doing. Just because you are ignorant of them doesn't mean it can't be done. Rather, it means that if you are genuinely curious about the question of evaluating recommendations then you have to hit the books and educate yourself. I gave you a recommendation - start there.

Here's my advice to you (that probably has very little value because I'm sure you're not going to take it lol): Be humble. When you think you have something novel, ask yourself, "Why am I so smart and they are so stupid?" If you can't come up with a good answer for that, then you probably aren't, and they aren't either.

What I think happened is that you wrote your essay about laptops and was upset about the feedback that you got, so you wanted to defend yourself and came up with this gibberish to sound like some kind of expert in decision making, not realizing that you were stepping into an area that already has tools and techniques far beyond what you currently understand. Why should we use "WABR" (which apparently even you don't know how to measure), when there already exist methods that can actually be used to make those kind of evaluations?

It takes a big man to admit he's wrong, and I hope that at some point you are able to follow the first law of holes and stop digging. You don't have anything new here. But if you actually had familiarity with the field I'm sure you could have written a good introductory essay about how social scientists test the effect of interventions such as advice, which could have been quite nice and useful. However, what you have now (recommending that we should compare values of a metric that can't actually be calculated) is just kind of silly and pointless.

tl;dr Yes I would modify your approach. You are proposing a solution that grossly oversimplifies the problem by making a huge assumption that rarely holds in real life. It's not even wrong

That is a huge assumption that will not be true. Simply dividing a group randomly does not make the raw results coming out the other end meaningful. Do the 50 people in group 1 have the same starting weights as group 2? Same disposable incomes? Same amount of free time? Same stress level at home? Same family history? What if people move out of the area or otherwise lose contact? If you select groups of 50 randomly you will almost certainly have different distributions of underlying factors that could all plausibly have an impact on compliance with the regimen and effect of a well-followed treatment.

Maybe if you have a sufficient budget you can increase the sample size so that you are more confident that the two groups overlap. But are you sure? You don't even want to look at inputs and instead look only at end results so you will never be sure. And even if you could increase the sample size, with a sufficiently high multidimensional problem (which is generally the most important kind of problem) you can never truly ensure equality between groups.

So what would I do? First, I would do a better job splitting up the groups. No I won't explain how I would do it but you can find plenty of information on good experimental design elsewhere. Second, even with careful experimental design I probably wouldn't get perfect overlap, so I would build a model to test the effect of intent to treat on treatment rates and then treatment on the end variable, and do poststratification on the model versus the population to evaluate the intent to treat. The difference between what real researchers do and what you propose is like the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.

Yes I have a better alternative, and I'll do the best to help you out in the length of a comment. Everyone who runs social science experiments nowadays knows that there are problems with interventions; namely, some people who are assigned to the intervention group will not do it (e.g., proper diet and exercise) and some people who are assigned to the control group will actually do the intervention (e.g. they will eat healthy and exercise even if you don't tell them to). Modern statistics deals with these issues pretty well, and is able to give us metrics about how effective the actual treatment is, how well people are able to follow advice, and how good the advice actually is.

To get up to speed, you can read a good text such as this. If you already have a good stats background, you can go straight to chapter 9 and read from there.

Halfway through the dieting example it became clear that the author is completely unaware of multiple regression techniques, instrumental variables, or bayesian analysis, let alone experiment design. One would expect at least a cursory literature search (or even google) before writing so much about what is effectively a solved problem. He probably invents his own sort methodologies, revolutionizes page ranking algorithms, and rolls his own cryptographic hashes too.

Any time you talk about hitting the end of the universe you are going to have to deal with arrow of time issues, like mbone points out (e.g. you can't unmix the cream in your coffee).

But your point about predictive models still holds

Yeah but in one of the universes there was a mathematician named 6ul6r and so 6 *is* between 2 and 3

Something like this is probably the best idea. Or simply put up a big sign that says "Expected time to exit is [ ] hours". You can update that sign however frequently you want. People will make their own decisions about their own time management. If they don't want to wait in line for 5 hours, then they won't get in line when the sign says you will wait 5 hours.You won't need to coordinate with organizers or anything, just watch and update.

I know the quote is apocryphal, but the topic it was supposedly said about was a competing idea for a system of governance. About who gets power and who gets disenfranchised, very much like the question of Prop 8.

It is precisely in those important questions that opposing voices must be heard, and be given the opportunity to zealously defend their cause, as though by defense counsel for a heinous criminal. Even the Catholic Church has a Devil's advocate who argues against someone being given sainthood. Allowing people the freedom to show their support for bad things is good not just because it ensures our freedom should we ever hold a position that is widely viewed as immoral, but because how we treat those who disagree with us says a lot about what kind of people we are.

We need more of this in our public discourse.

I don't think they are saying that the typical user will experience a 5 minute longer delay; rather, the typical user will experience a shorter wait time. If the entire system is 40% more efficient, then even if you have to wait a little longer because the cab goes a little out of your way, that should be offset by a lower wait time. *Some* users will experience higher wait + travel times, but as they say here, no more than a few minutes.

The reason that they bring it up is because there are certain kinds of optimizations that will optimize the heck out of the average value, but they make the worst value an order of magnitude worse. For example, imagine a new proposal that would keep all the cabs in densely populated downtown and never go uptown whenever there was anybody waiting downtown. If there was a big enough ratio of people downtown versus uptown, then the average trip length would get better under this proposal, but the worst waiting time (for the uptowners) would be terrible.

Having said that, part of the reason why people take cabs is to get exactly where they are going, as fast as they can. If they wanted to get approximately where they wanted to go, with more people onboard, they would take a subway (or even the bus).