We get way too hung up on data; especially when it reinforces our personal bias.

Some time ago, I had a discussion here, where I mentioned that the average commute time from the suburban community in which I live, to downtown Manhattan, was generally 90 minutes to two and a half hours.

This was based on purely anecdotal data. That data includes the daily news on the radio and TV, which considers commutes from suburbs, important enough to dedicate significant airtime.

It was attacked, because some organization published some statistics, that said the average suburban commute time was 27 minutes. I was told that I was exaggerating, and being overly negative.

Here's a math word problem:

Harry lives 25 miles, as the crow flies, from his destination. However, the roads make it 40 miles.

Of those roads, 10 miles are suburban side roads that Harry needs to take, to get to the highway. The average speed is 25 MpH.

Once Harry hits the highway, though, the real fun begins. It's stop-and-go traffic (20MpH) for 28 miles. Once he gets to the city, he needs to navigate another 2 miles, through the most God-awful traffic on Earth, to where he needs to drive around for up to a half hour, looking for a parking space.

How does Harry make the drive in 27 minutes?

A fairly significant number of folks just took that ridiculous statistic, and were quite comfortable, calling me a liar, based on it. It was kind of jaw-dropping; considering the types of folks that we have, here.

That sounds a bit more "cultish" than we might be comfortable acknowledging.

> "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."

-Mark Twain

> We get way too hung up on data; especially when it reinforces our personal bias.

While I don't disagree that we generally get too hung up on data, "It's a problem when the data matches the hypothesis" is an odd blanket interpretation of the scientific method.

The commute only takes 27 minutes if we ignore that everybody else has an LLM- erh, car I mean.

Think you’re clever because your LLM contacts 100 businesses? Imagine 100000 businesses doing the same thing. You’ve just eradicated human support, because nobody’s going to sit through this BS bot future. Good luck when you get auto-flagged for some reason and there’s not a single human to revert or care.