←back to thread

A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

(www.theguardian.com)
196 points RapperWhoMadeIt | 1 comments | 27 Mar 25 13:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source
Show context
itissid ◴[27 Mar 25 14:55 UTC] No.43494328[source]▶
Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.

If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.

One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.

replies(9): >>43494764 #>>43494891 #>>43495004 #>>43495084 #>>43495257 #>>43496037 #>>43496176 #>>43498094 #>>43506489 #
toast0 ◴[27 Mar 25 16:00 UTC] No.43495004[source]▶
You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make predictions.

I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.

replies(1): >>43495066 #
d4mi3n ◴[27 Mar 25 16:08 UTC] No.43495066[source]▶
I read it as the GP saying there's often confusion about assuming behavior about individuals as opposed to making predictions based on trends of large groups of individuals.

For some population, you can safely state that some portion of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner, etc).

replies(1): >>43495339 #
1. toast0 ◴[27 Mar 25 16:36 UTC] No.43495339[source]▶
The same is true of say washing machine motors. You can predict that ~ 10% of them will fail in a certain amount of time (and even go into how they fail), but that doesn't tell you much about a specific motor. Or sports events, if you say there's a 25% chance of team A winning a single match; the results of the match don't support or refute your prediction... you'd have to run many matches to see if your prediction was empirically correct.