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by yusefnapora 790 days ago
Have you ever been in _any_ situation in which you've had complete data?
2 comments

Absolutely, it happens all the time. I'm surprised to even hear this question on a nerdy computer platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

Plenty of games with complete information. Here's a famous one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess

Any real-world situation (outside of simple trivial matters)? War, health care, immigration, economics, running a business, those kind of things. Chess is just a game and not very important. No one is talking about games here.

Getting a good overview of what happens at scale is exceedingly hard, and on pretty much all of this you need to take in more inputs than what can be strictly quantified.

> Any real-world situation (outside of simple trivial matters)?

I knew someone would come along and move the goalposts.

Why don't you provide an example then? Or you come up with an example where having additional and relevant data is explicitly _worse_ for the outcome.

No one is moving anything. Does the linked article talk about chess? Or matters like war, business, health care, and hiring? The context of what's being discussed here is political and business decisions, not games like chess.

No one in this entire thread claimed that having more data is bad. This is also not what the fallacy is about and no one is against having good quantifiable data.

> No one is moving anything.

Incorrect! I don't know either of you, but let's play fairly.

The other person was asked if they ever had complete information, then they provided an example. Then the goalposts were moved to not only "real world situation," but "non-trivial."

It's possible to deem any real-world situation they offered in return with complete information to be "trivial," thus moving the goalposts again.

So if you don't have "complete" data, you just start winging it? I never understand this argument.

You measure what you can, that moves you forward.

No, that's exactly what the McNamara fallacy is about.

"US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara, who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

The problem, for the US involvement in Vietnam, was that "body count" was irrelevant. The only metric that mattered was the willingness to fight of communist Vietnam, China, and the USSR. The problem is that "will" is not numerical. It is willingness to fight among the political elite of those countries and they include domestic factors, economic factors, and military factors. If anything, McNamara's fallacy is like comparing the iPhone and Android and saying the only thing that matters is screen size.