gjm comments on Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: MrMind 16 November 2015 08:03AM

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Comment author: gjm 18 November 2015 11:24:29AM 3 points [-]

Huh. That never occurred to me (even though I spend a lot of my days writing code too).

In case you're expressing actual uncertainty rather than merely what your brain gets confused about, the answer is that a false positive is something that falsely looks positive. Perhaps the best way to put it is different, though: a false positive is a positive result of your test (so it actually is a positive) that doesn't match the underlying reality. Like a "false alarm".