
Deterministic thinking: a problem in how we think, not just in how we act - Symmetry
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/09/13/deterministic-thinking-dichotomania/
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the8472
Some additional examples of people fixing instances of this problem

 _Dissolving the fermi paradox_ [0], convolves distributions instead of
multiplying point estimates of life/no life.

 _How to NOT measure latency_ , looks at CDFs instead of slow/fast thresholds.

[0]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf)
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU)

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jamesrcole
This post is about "the compulsion to replace quantities with dichotomies
(‘black-and-white thinking’), even when such dichotomization is unnecessary
and misleading for inference" \-- I don't understand why they're calling this
_deterministic_ thinking!

As far as I can see the phenomenon they're talking about has nothing to do
with the quality of being deterministic, and I didn't notice any explanation
of why they've chosen that particular word. Is there some other notion of
deterministic aside from the usual one?

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air7
Deterministic in the sense of determining things to their "value" instead of
leaving them as a continuous probability.

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seafoam
Discrete is the word for that.

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lidHanteyk
I think that we need more of this sort of thinking, but I'm not sure how much
more.

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gmfawcett
Well played, sir. :)

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joshuak
Deterministic in this context* refers to the inherent error in conceiving of
correlation questions as a limited set of discrete possibilities.

For example, given that event A correlates well with B one is likely to ask:

1) Does A cause B?

2) Does B cause A?

3) Does some unknown cause A and B?

Framing the possibilities in this way neglects interactions in which all
possibilities are true to some degree. The author argues that all
possibilities being true to some non-zero degree (A causes B and B causes A
and an unknown causes both A and B) should be the more common expectation in
natural systems. Therefor, framing problems in a way that suggests there are
clear exclusions i.e. determinations, leads to cognitive bias and premature
conclusions.

*As apposed the the common usage of deterministic in computer science where a process is said to be deterministic if every execution with identical inputs produces the same result.

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killjoywashere
Coming from Physics to Medicine this was one of my main frustrations: how
could they possibly know the mechanisms so well in advance of the experiment?!
These cells are soup! Now that I am in this world, I think the problem is
implicitly acknowledged from top to bottom and whats really amazing is how
much they, we, really have figured out by persistently, billions of times
over, asking dumb, binary questions.

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jart
What do sociologists, spiritualists, and LSD users have in common? They love
sharing viewpoints that, in essence, boil down to a critique of the Law of
Identity. All is one man. Classic logic principles have been so deeply
embedded in our culture and everything we do for so long, it's sort of like
poking at the keystone of Western Civilization, while coming across sounding
to many folks as an enlightened nuanced perspective.

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skybrian
It seems like this bias towards discrete choices is built into language. For
any adjective, one must decide whether it's appropriately used or not.

Nonetheless, it's possible to acknowledge uncertainty more than we usually do.

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rch
I find it interesting that you've used the word 'we' given that a portion of
your audience will spend the day working with inference, optimization,
probabilistic programming, and the like.

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skybrian
I was thinking more about the confident assertions you often see here in hot
political topics. It's good to get in the habit of taking a step back and
saying "wait, how much do I really know about this?"

To apply this principle here, I'm not sure I know much about what Hacker News
readers do. It's easier to know what they comment about, since this is
something I actually see.

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mlanghoff
I'm about to read up on Ron Kenet's book on Information Quality. I am truly
curious how he addresses the history of the dimension discovery.

It seems to be that as we learn more about what it means to think less
objectively-- our ability to see and understand more dimensionality to
information quality expand.

Deterministic thinking is fine as a methodology for understanding aspects of
object X, as long as it is does not resolve as absolute. This is why the
practice of history is imperative, but a also slippery slope.

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CodexArcanum
I believe a lot of this thinking arises from our perception of time and
history. We often perceive the past only as "things that happened" and forget
about all the things that could have happened. There was an article posted
recently about "near-miss" analysis of events that almost-happen which
discussed something very similar.

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toss1
Yes - makes me wonder how much of the perception of time and history is
influenced by teaching and testing methods such as being required to memorize
the dates of events (e.g., 25-Oct-1415) rather than the chains of causation
(Why were Henry V and the French fighting, and how did they get there, and
what else could have happened).

Also the "near-miss" analysis reminds me of seeing smart companies requiring
reporting of near-misses, not only of accidents -- that kind of more nuanced
analysis is more likely to prevent accidents even before the first one
happens, rather than losing at least one finger/hand/person to a problem type.

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rwj
See also false dichotomy.

