Thanks, Ellen. Evocative quote, isn't it? It's that "without requiring
*any* (!) specialized knowledge" that will be the dangerous part, if read
too literally by the naive.
Interesting that you could get to Lim's URL at all. When _I _
tried it, several days ago, the system seemed to be trying to tell me that
the /forums part of the URL wasn't accessible. But perhaps the problem
was only temporary.
-- Don.
On Sun, 30 Apr 2000, Ellen Hertz wrote:
> I looked up one and copied it:
>
> "For the first time, thanks to the increased power of computers,
> new methods replace the skill of the statistical artisan with
> massive-computational methods, obtaining equal or better results in far
> less time without requiring any specialised knowledge."
>
> In all fairness, I haven't read the whole paper and if he is referring
> purely to computations such as generating maximum likelihood estimates
> or inverting matrices, he is quite right that computers beat pencils.
> If he means to just run programs without knowing what they mean
... "untouched by the human mind", as Heidi Kass used to put it ...
> and generate GIGO, that certainly is dangerous.
Ayuh. -- DFB.
> Ellen Hertz
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