I've seen all kinds of weird people on the Net. I've been to BNet forums which is pretty close to the bottom of humanity, and of course it's not like elsewhere of humanity have nice people either. But there's one type of people that annoys me even more than apparently some of you hate Seeker: People who use math incorrectly to back up their argument.
Maybe it's because I always liked math, but I think using math incorrectly is a sin. You can make any crazy unsubstantiated argument and that's fine by me, but if you want to use math stuff you should at least know the terms you're quoting and whether they're relevant. I remember in college, when taking Astrophysics, the students asked why don't we use calculus or DE or all these fancy math stuf we learn to model say, the Sun. His reply was that if you bring out the big guns for things that can be modeled as a uniformly distributed sphere, then you're not only wasting your time, but you're also modeling it incorrectly. When we get to parts of the sun that doesn't look like a uniformally distributed sphere of hydrogen, then yeah we can bring out the big guns of mathematics.
Recently I've been in a protracted debate on EverQuest over survivability of the main tank. Now I am the main tank of my guild. The guild's success depends very much on my survival (while encounters aren't all about the survival of the main tank, suffice to say nothing good can possibly happen if the MT doesn't survive). I crunch a lot of numbers and model the fights a lot to determine how to optimize survivability. So recently the argument went something like this:
Me: (stuff that would bore you that you wouldn't want to listen)
The official Warrior Correspondant: I have determined the mode is 1.3123123 and therefore I'm right.
Now his data was in a range where the only values that make sense for the mode (the most frequent value) are the integer values betwen 1-20 and what he meant was if you take the average of the distribution, 1.31 would be your mean. Obviously he failed statistics or better yet never actually took statistics, but it's amazing the number of people who thinks 'the mode is 1.31' sounds right because it's too complicated for them to understand. Actually, these people will just pretend they know what the mode means so they don't sound dumb. It's quite literally Emperor's New Cloth. The tools I used, in the end, is just the average, and concluded that the higher your HP divided by DPS (damage per second) is, the more likely you'll live (which is sort of a duh conclusion, indeed) so you either want to increase HP or decrease DPS (more AC, usually). However, the other camp apparently decided that lowering the 'mode' was the way to survive, even though the mode of every high end Warrior would be exactly 1, and in the end come to the conclusion that only AC matters and HP is irrelevant. I cannot fathom that, after all the math is done, the answer is something anyone can come up with (to survive, either have more HP or take less damage), and yet people can badly apply math and get a totally different result. Actually, this reminds me of my high school science fair where some guy took the pattern of water flowing down a drain, and according to his TI-85 it matches the equation 1.12312X^3 - 1231X^2 + 3 = 0 and he just discovered some fundamental equation that describes how water flows down a drain.
This kind of reminds me something someone posted here (think it was Kupek) about how if you've the knowledge of something, then you'd have to force yourself to forget it to be amused. If I just forget what math is, I'll have an easier time talking to people, but I think that's a really bad way to communicate.
Maybe it's because I always liked math, but I think using math incorrectly is a sin. You can make any crazy unsubstantiated argument and that's fine by me, but if you want to use math stuff you should at least know the terms you're quoting and whether they're relevant. I remember in college, when taking Astrophysics, the students asked why don't we use calculus or DE or all these fancy math stuf we learn to model say, the Sun. His reply was that if you bring out the big guns for things that can be modeled as a uniformly distributed sphere, then you're not only wasting your time, but you're also modeling it incorrectly. When we get to parts of the sun that doesn't look like a uniformally distributed sphere of hydrogen, then yeah we can bring out the big guns of mathematics.
Recently I've been in a protracted debate on EverQuest over survivability of the main tank. Now I am the main tank of my guild. The guild's success depends very much on my survival (while encounters aren't all about the survival of the main tank, suffice to say nothing good can possibly happen if the MT doesn't survive). I crunch a lot of numbers and model the fights a lot to determine how to optimize survivability. So recently the argument went something like this:
Me: (stuff that would bore you that you wouldn't want to listen)
The official Warrior Correspondant: I have determined the mode is 1.3123123 and therefore I'm right.
Now his data was in a range where the only values that make sense for the mode (the most frequent value) are the integer values betwen 1-20 and what he meant was if you take the average of the distribution, 1.31 would be your mean. Obviously he failed statistics or better yet never actually took statistics, but it's amazing the number of people who thinks 'the mode is 1.31' sounds right because it's too complicated for them to understand. Actually, these people will just pretend they know what the mode means so they don't sound dumb. It's quite literally Emperor's New Cloth. The tools I used, in the end, is just the average, and concluded that the higher your HP divided by DPS (damage per second) is, the more likely you'll live (which is sort of a duh conclusion, indeed) so you either want to increase HP or decrease DPS (more AC, usually). However, the other camp apparently decided that lowering the 'mode' was the way to survive, even though the mode of every high end Warrior would be exactly 1, and in the end come to the conclusion that only AC matters and HP is irrelevant. I cannot fathom that, after all the math is done, the answer is something anyone can come up with (to survive, either have more HP or take less damage), and yet people can badly apply math and get a totally different result. Actually, this reminds me of my high school science fair where some guy took the pattern of water flowing down a drain, and according to his TI-85 it matches the equation 1.12312X^3 - 1231X^2 + 3 = 0 and he just discovered some fundamental equation that describes how water flows down a drain.
This kind of reminds me something someone posted here (think it was Kupek) about how if you've the knowledge of something, then you'd have to force yourself to forget it to be amused. If I just forget what math is, I'll have an easier time talking to people, but I think that's a really bad way to communicate.
