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sh34r • today at 4:53 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

This is the pseudo-intellectual version of your boomer relative ranting about the weatherman on TV, “how does this guy still have a job when he’s always wrong!”

Or the poll-bashing that happened after the 2016 election when an outcome with a 29% chance per one model was observed.

Any interesting forecasting problem is underconstrained. Monte Carlo methods are the classic way to mitigate that one-universe problem.

Nobody can predict the future with certainty. All models are wrong, but some are useful.


Replies

whatever1 • today at 5:05 PM

How does Monte Carlo help mitigation?

I fully agree that all models are wrong.

Their main usage is just replaying the past or encoding the modelers assumptions for the future.

But there is no way to know if a model is good or bad.

There would be if we had infinite universes.

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