Raising a false alarm doesn’t mean the underlying issue isn’t there.

It just means the cause of the alarm is unrelated to the issue.

Sure, but people don't split hairs this hard in everyday conversation. Everyone will knoe what you mean when you say someone "cried wolf," it means they raised an alarm about nothing.

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soco 8 months ago | parent [-]

Since we're splitting the hairs already, all what the metaphor says is that false positives are bad for the system.

	▲	mihaic 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		You're right on this. The problem is that in real life it's sometimes harmful to have false positives (putting innocent people in prison) and sometimes you should side with caution and accept some false positives to make sure you identify the problems (better postpone a space launch if something might be bad until you've verified it's actually ok). If you can't think for yourself, your only option is to always use one of these modes.