Re:For experts who study coronaviruses, a grim vindication
by catalogia on Monday June 08, 2020 @03:46PM
(#23460019)
As a practical matter, if somebody has a 1/200 chance of being right when sounding the alarm, by the time something actually happens I think nearly everybody will have written them off as the 'boy who cries wolf.'
Re:For experts who study coronaviruses, a grim vindication
by baddox on Monday June 08, 2020 @02:33PM
(#23459322)
It's a bad success ratio if the 200 predictions didn't have good explanations for why they were made, because that means they are essentially 200 arbitrary predictions. In that case, the fact that one prediction came true is irrelevant.
To put it another way: if you're making arbitrary predictions without explanations, then you increase the likelihood of a prediction coming true by increasing the number of predictions you make. But clearly we shouldn't value predictors simply based on the number of predictions they make.
Even though, they were 200, the fact that one of them was identified correctly, saved human civilization as a whole.
The point being, 1 in 200 is not a bad success ratio per se