Comments on: Monday morning unknown unknowns https://didacticmind.com/2021/07/monday-morning-unknown-unknowns.html Strategic Defence of the Mantle of Responsibility Fri, 09 Jul 2021 11:00:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Didact https://didacticmind.com/2021/07/monday-morning-unknown-unknowns.html#comment-6344 Fri, 09 Jul 2021 11:00:05 +0000 https://didacticmind.com/?p=12067#comment-6344 In reply to PB.

You are right, I stand corrected – it was HMS Hood, not HMS Repulse.

]]> By: PB https://didacticmind.com/2021/07/monday-morning-unknown-unknowns.html#comment-6342 Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:29:29 +0000 https://didacticmind.com/?p=12067#comment-6342 The Japs sunk the battlecruiser Repulse early in the Pacific War from the air. Interestingly, the other ship was the new battleship Prince of Wales which was damaged by the Bismarck earlier in the year in its famous and doomed foray into the North Atlantic. Bismarck traded salvoes with Prince of Wales and both were wounded. In the same battle Bismarck sank the most famous battleship in the world, the mighty Hood. (Which had a glass jaw).

]]> By: Robert W https://didacticmind.com/2021/07/monday-morning-unknown-unknowns.html#comment-6336 Tue, 06 Jul 2021 19:06:33 +0000 https://didacticmind.com/?p=12067#comment-6336 “The new study, appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, utilized Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to enlist more than 1,500 volunteers to rate paintings in the genres of impressionism, cubism, abstract, and color field. The volunteers’ answers were fed into a computer program and then, after this training period, the computer could predict the volunteers’ art preferences much better than would happen by chance.”

This is remarkable. From the mturk website, it looks like Amazon has figured out a way to combine focus groups, study panels, and Tim-Ferris-Microbots all into one.
Example:

““The F&B industry has always operated at the mercy of changing tastes and preferences of consumers. Our goal is to surface consumer insights and spot emerging trends, so our clients can effectively respond with effective strategies. Workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk respond to our requests to gather information from menus, websites, and other channels. We are able to leverage these human collective insights to better understand customer needs and uncover important market trends.”

– David Falck, Executive Director, Food Genius / US Foods Data Science”

I don’t often agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but he does have this strength:
When he tears down someone else’s arrogance and supports the good and the beautiful.

In the veritasium video, he calls out the professor by saying-ish “it showed speed at 2.6 times the speed of the wind, that’s significant.”
Then the professor has to blubber an answer. He had very poorly understood the magnitudes he was engaged with.
Reminds me of this star ship smackdown from a decade ago, where Tyson speaks the truth with an eloquence every man should dream of possessing: https://youtu.be/OyUN5vG1T8k

What’s jarring about the Veritasium video: How much more clear could the evidence be that the practical reality was different from the theoretical physics? Then the gamma-tude to write and argue that it’s not possible, when the guy drove the blackbird that did it…and then to shove your 10k wad on the table because the reality simply must be wrong. In the logic of NN Taleb, this man surely does not deadlift.

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