Nope, this is nothing of the sort. It's just a case of two people solving two different (if related) problems, and everybody else trying to draw (by necessity, completely worthless) conclusions by comparing solutions to different problems.
McIlroy solved the K most common words problem. Knuth used a from-the-ground-up solution to that problem as a way to illustrate how Literate Programming works. His solution was never meant to be as tiny as McIlroy's, it needed enough meat on it that LP actually did something non-trivial.
Garak: "My doctor, they're all true."
Bashir: "Even the lies?"
Garak: "Especially the lies."
I personally take this to mean that sometimes its the overall message a story is conveying is more important than the specific details.
I don’t believe in faeries, but they are there.
I spent quite a few years trying to balance different kinds of speed in "quick and dirty solutions" - speed of writing, speed of execution, speed of understanding...and the risk of failure. To me, that's infinitely more interesting and enjoyable than an unconstrained environment or just one dimension of optimization.
Edit: Well, assuming it happened, as going by other comments here maybe it didn't!
(emphasis in the original)
This is a rather extreme take. Ignoring the rather important fact that the author of the piece missed at least one important source where Wallis gives Wald credit (see the postscript), arguing that something must be "considered as fiction" because it is not attested to in the (known) written sources is unreasonable.
I don't know at what point the postscript was added (it appears in the first archive.org snapshot of the page, from 2018; the essay was first published in 2016), but it seems misleading to leave the whole rant up there and then tack on a bit at the end saying "Oh I was wrong by the way."
I did read through one of Wald's papers after reading that article, and I agree with the thesis that there's little in them about survivorship bias or a strong need to correct it. Maybe "debunk" is the wrong term; it's more of a clarification and re-emphasis of his actual work.
The US went during the day mostly aiming for precision bombing of targets. The UK went at night with mass bombing runs.
The UK had horrible casualties until the introduction of chaff. After that they shut down the German air defense and took out Dresden. The USA had lighter casualties but didn't dare hit targets at the same range until they had better fighter escorts. Fighter escorts didn't work so well for the British because the German planes had better radar.
And while we are at it, the European war was mostly won by American manufacturing and Russian soldiers. During the Cold War decades, we retold the story in ways that minimized the Soviet contribution. But more German soldiers died fighting on the Eastern front than were killed by all other countries in all other theaters of war combined.
That's one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is that WW2 was two separate campaigns: one between all the powers you normally think about, and the other just between Germany and Russia, an entirely-optional war that likely wouldn't have begun if Germany hadn't decided to start it. It's not really that Russia was aiding the Western powers in a single fight; it's more that an independent, simultaneous Russo-German conflict starved Germany of the materiel it needed for its other campaign.
See also: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-if-hitler-never-in...
I'm skeptical on the USSR executing on a plan to attack Germany only two weeks later given how disorganized they were in the face of the German attack. The Russian army isn't something you can move across the country in a couple of weeks.
I'm not endorsing the argument, note; I haven't looked into this enough to have anything resembling a useful opinion.
And yet you rushed to disseminate it.
Make people repeat the same lie 10,000 times and they'll start believing it.
[Citation needed]
Setting intentions aside, as mentioned by the OP, the Eastern front is where Germans lots the most blood and resources. If not for that, the resistance in the other theaters would be fierce.
There is a great deal of consensus among historians that it was absolutely inevitable and unpreventable. A reasonable minority even support Suvorov's claims that the USSR was planning to start the conflict and Germany only beat them to it by a couple of weeks.
- Poland [1]
- Estonia [2]
- Latvia [3]
- UK, France, Italy [4]
It is important to note that all of these pacts were made prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Your comment misrepresents the historical situation, which is that USSR observed many powerful Euro countries making agreements with Nazi Germany, and Stalin realised that USSR would be on their own in a war with Germany. Which is in fact what happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_Non-Aggr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Estonian_Non-Ag...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Latvian_Non-Agg...
President Roosevelt one day asked what this War should be called. My answer was, "The Unnecessary War." If the United Stated States had taken an active part in the League of Nations, and if the League of Nations had been prepared to use concerted force, even had it only been European force, to prevent the re-armament of Germany, there was no need for further serious bloodshed. If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his early stages, even up to his seizure of the Rhineland in 1936, he would have been forced to recoil, and a chance would have been given to the sane elements in German life, which were very powerful especially in the High Command, to free Germany of the maniacal Government and system into the grip of which she was falling.Do not forget that twice the German people, by a majority, voted against Hitler, but the Allies and the League of Nations acted with such feebleness and lack of clairvoyance, that each of Hitler's encroachments became a triumph for him over all moderate and restraining forces until, finally, we resigned ourselves without further protest to the vast process of German re-armament and war preparation which ended in a renewed outbreak of destructive war. Let us profit at least by this terrible lesson. In vain did I attempt to teach it before the war.
In his book The Gathering Storm, he adds several more points where Hitler could have been easily stopped before he started.
...Keynes began work on The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It was published in December 1919 and was widely read. In the book, Keynes made a grim prophecy that would have particular relevance to the next generation of Europeans: "If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation."
Germany soon fell hopelessly behind in its reparations payments, and in 1923 France and Belgium occupied the industrial Ruhr region as a means of forcing payment. In protest, workers and employers closed down the factories in the region. Catastrophic inflation ensued, and Germany's fragile economy began quickly to collapse. By the time the crash came in November 1923, a lifetime of savings could not buy a loaf of bread. That month, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler launched an abortive coup against Germany's government. The Nazis were crushed and Hitler was imprisoned, but many resentful Germans sympathized with the Nazis and their hatred of the Treaty of Versailles.
A decade later, Hitler would exploit this continuing bitterness among Germans to seize control of the German state. In the 1930s, the Treaty of Versailles was significantly revised and altered in Germany's favor, but this belated amendment could not stop the rise of German militarism and the subsequent outbreak of World War II.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/keynes-predicts-...
The stab in the back Jews made us loose WWI myth started right after WWI ended. Nazi and other radicals were very active well before Ruth and did engaged in Ruth making happen the way it did too.
The continuing bitterness among Germans was something Hitler not just exploited, but actively worked on keeping and inflaming. He actively worked against solutions and agreements that could make situation better.
Significant portion of Germans did not believed they actually lost the WWI and really wanted to redo - not just for economy. But also because Germany had long militaristic tradition and values that did not just died after war.
On small scale, the Prussian old guard tried to side-step some of the armament restrictions - notably doing some joint tank development with the Soviet Union - but before Hitler said piss off and began rearming in earnest, the Wehrmacht was limited to 100k, virtually no planes, and a remnant of the Kaiser's fleet.
And how exactly do you know this?
Maybe if the USSR hadn't bought the time and buffer space by this deal, the Germany would've taken the whole Poland and continued with the attack on the USSR? Maybe the West would've been standing aside (like it did during the Munich Betrayal, like it did during the Phony War) and watching with satisfaction how Nazies are killing Communists? And later watching how all Slavic and Jewish population of occupied territories gets exterminated?
I’m not sure a statistician would make that assumption. I’ve only heard this story told in the context of survivorship bias, not root cause analysis
Edit: I don’t mind the downvotes but please help contribute to the discussion by explaining what is disagreed with
You also have to make some assumption about the initial distribution of the hits in order to do an analysis of survivorship bias.
If you read some of the replies, you’ll see one of the fixes involved fighter escorts. This is probably based on an assumption that fighters contributed to the downing of aircraft. These would probably have a different shot distribution than anti aircraft artillery.
Not to belabor the point, but jumping to conclusions on assumptions is exactly what good root cause analysis guards us against. A random distribution may be reasonable for an uninitiated statistician but I’m not sure one with some domain background in the problem would make the same assumptions.
Except that this one is extreme. It is hard to find any programmer who builds a more perfect tool than Knuth. There isn't a better known problem where the discrepancy between the perfect and the good is this dramatic. Therefore this became the poster child for this ongoing type of conflict retold by those who see themselves as on the side of the quick and dirty solution built out of preassembled pieces. Who, of course, slant the story to further fit their prejudices.
This kind of slanting is common. Take a famous WW II example where they were looking to improve bomber durability by putting more armor plate where the bombers were coming back hit. A wise statistician advised them that those were the spots that didn't need armor, they should put it on where the bombers were hit and didn't come back. Which, assuming that bombers were hit evenly everywhere, was all the places that they didn't find holes.
The reasoning is perfect, and illustrates a key point of statistical wisdom. But the retelling of the story almost never admits that the advice didn't really make a difference. The actual solution to the rate at which bombers were being destroyed was to drop chaff - strips of aluminum cut to half the length of the German radar - so that the radar systems got overwhelmed and the Germans couldn't find the bombers.