| > When presented with this tradeoff, the path of least resistance is to say “Let’s just keep the threshold lower. We’d rather get woken up when there’s nothing broken than sleep through a real problem.” And I can sympathize with that attitude. Undetected outages are embarrassing and harmful to your reputation. Surely it’s preferable to deal with a few late-night fire drills. > It’s a trap. > In the long run, false positives can — and will often — hurt you more than false negatives. Let’s learn about the base rate fallacy. Not sure about anyone else, but speaking of alarms, this style of writing trips my "self-promoting snake-oil Internet bullshitter" alarm. It's like nails on a damn chalkboard, and if you're writing like this, you've already lost me; however, maybe I ought not be pointing that out, since signals are nice to have. Incidentally, I wasn't sure which way the author was gonna go with the core analogy. My smoke alarms have false-alarmed probably 10x as much as my car alarm, even counting times one of us has hit the alarm button on the fob by accident. I've certainly never been so annoyed by my car alarm that I've ripped it out and stuck it in a freezer, as I have with a smoke alarm. (If I were writing like the author I suppose that last part would have read: "I've certainly never been so annoyed by my car alarm that I've ripped it out and stuck it in a chest freezer. I have, with a smoke alarm." Except also I'd have found a way to use "we" and "you" a bunch.) |
A trope of this style is “{interesting half story} but more on that later”.
I don’t think it is a big deal and I don’t see much self promotion here other than vanilla blogging, i.e. sounds like this person is knowledgeable let’s check their bio.