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RE: Do Companies Purposely Mislead?

in #math7 years ago

The world is too random for events to be predicted by statistics.

Whether it's Monte Carlo or anything that we humans come up with there is no way we can predict events in the future.

When the guy who wrote "The Signal and the noise" was completely wrong and so many others who try to predict the future with historical data are "fooled by randomness" (check this book too), we can stop trying to think that statistical significance can predict human behavior.

Whether they do it on purpose or not, just expect that those company reports have no idea what they're talking about.

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I'll have to read those two. I agree with you 100%. Obviously the desire to know or predict the future could be beneficial in society on so many levels (and in some cases detrimental, depending on who would use it for selfish reasons and how that knowledge would be used).

You bring up a good point. But by just changing one word in how I view statistics, I believe, makes it fundamentally different to me. For me, statistics is more about calculating the risk or finding how likely something could occur, not how likely something will occur.