[runj__]

Certainly something interesting is bound to come out of quantifying things? "Hm, this three act structure thing seems to work, I wonder why." "Children doesn't seem to understand texts which include these words, I wonder why."

Patterns rarely show themselves before we investigate.

[Nullabillity]

> Certainly something interesting is bound to come out of quantifying things?

In science they call this trap P-hacking. Even data "scientists" know to be wary of overfitting. We're really good at finding patterns, but few of them actually mean anything.

[davorak]

>> Certainly something interesting is bound to come out of quantifying things?

> In science they call this trap P-hacking. Even data "scientists" know to be wary of overfitting. We're really good at finding patterns, but few of them actually mean anything.

Quantifying things is not always p-hacking. When people do experiments on novel materials or structures they quantify the data, make readings and record them, and then look for patterns. For example measuring the electronic properties of a new novel nano structure or molecule.

When I think of p-hacking[1] I think of using the same static data and doing various data analysis over and over again until something potentially interesting is found and ignoring the risks of false positives as you do so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging