<story><title>Deterministic thinking: a problem in how we think, not just in how we act</title><url>https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/09/13/deterministic-thinking-dichotomania/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>the8472</author><text>Some additional examples of people fixing instances of this problem&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Dissolving the fermi paradox&lt;/i&gt;[0], convolves distributions instead of multiplying point estimates of life&amp;#x2F;no life.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;How to NOT measure latency&lt;/i&gt;, looks at CDFs instead of slow&amp;#x2F;fast thresholds.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;1806.02404.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;1806.02404.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Deterministic thinking: a problem in how we think, not just in how we act</title><url>https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/09/13/deterministic-thinking-dichotomania/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jamesrcole</author><text>This post is about &amp;quot;the compulsion to replace quantities with dichotomies (‘black-and-white thinking’), even when such dichotomization is unnecessary and misleading for inference&amp;quot; -- I don&amp;#x27;t understand why they&amp;#x27;re calling this &lt;i&gt;deterministic&lt;/i&gt; thinking!&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see the phenomenon they&amp;#x27;re talking about has nothing to do with the quality of being deterministic, and I didn&amp;#x27;t notice any explanation of why they&amp;#x27;ve chosen that particular word.  Is there some other notion of deterministic aside from the usual one?</text></comment>