Emil_Karlsson

Posts

Sorted by New

Wiki Contributions

Comments

Sorted by

I am new here, so I do not know how much I can contribute to the growing discussion.

Perhaps it may be useful to understand where something comes from in order to better handle it. A well known evolutionary argument, popularized by biologists such as Dawkins, suggests that there is an asymmetry in the evolutionary pay off between making false positives and false negatives. A Pleistocene hominid, as the argument goes, might at most waste some energy running away from a noise in the bushes that turns out to be nothing, but may waste its life if it does not run away when there is a predator in the bushes.

I do not know of any case where someone has said that they "should have known better" after making a false positive, say, "I knew I shouldn't have used the seat belt on the buss, we did not crash after all". I'm sure that more exclamations of this sort comes after a bush crashes and a person did not wear a seat belt, provided of course that the person survived.

I do not know how helpful or relevant this comment will be to the discussion, though.