Ed, (01)
I completely agree your points below. But you posted them after
one of my remarks, which made it appear as if you were disagreeing
with me. So I wanted to say that I agree with you: (02)
> But there is a host of difficulties with that, and the internet has made
> them manifest. The "data deluge" doesn't often come with clear
> "provenance metadata" -- who collected this data, and what were the
> circumstances and method of collection. It is easy to draw erroneous
> analytical conclusions, or find numerous fake exceptions to a
> theoretical result, by considering "inappropriate" data to be relevant.
> The internet is replete with data that is "inappropriate" by being
> outright false, but even with data that was validly captured and
> reported, it is not often easy to find out the values of the context
> variables.
>
> The advantage of legal precedent is that you have a well-known and
> reliable set of records that contains all of the contextual information
> that was available to the judges at the time the decision was made. So
> one can argue not only for precedent, but also about the relevance of a
> particular decision to the issue at hand, based on other elements in the
> context of that decision.
>
> [You have to realize that NIST is a scientific institution that prides
> itself on scientific conservatism. We publish a lot of data, and a lot
> of analytical and theoretical results. But when we generalize beyond
> what we have observed and can prove, we call it 'hypothesis'. Good
> science will always survive the deluge of undocumented data.
> Credibility is more important than visibility.] (03)
John (04)
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