The important thing is that it isn't based on the data you are attempting to analyse. It's fine to use subject matter expertise beforehand to decide on what is appropriate to include or not in your analysis.
The article seems to analyze a statistical practice from a theoretical perspective.
Using the same perspective, another way to formulate this discussion is:
1. Look at all the data in the universe.
2. Choose some to examine (using a non-random procedure).
3. From those, employ a variable selection procedure (the article argues against stepwise selection and somewhat for Lasso).
4. Fit a model to the remaining data.
In reality, there are at least 2 variable selections occurring. In the first variable selection (choosing data to examine from the universe of data), we are choosing those variables based on some procedure that is ultimately grounded in data.
This is a cache22: unless you look at all data that exists, you choose some subset based on all data that exists.
Courts have had little hesitation to decide these matters themselves for a long time - check out "Bite Mark Analysis" or any number of trials involving medical evidence. While I do think that they need to consider scientific matters they are vastly overconfident in the conclusions reached.
> They've never pretended to be anything else other than a budget airline where any extras or conveniences will cost you extra
This part is not objectionable - it's the lack of transparency and attempts to trick you into paying additional fees that are worse than normal. Take booking.com as a comparison. They are very up front about costs and your expected costs for a stay booked via them will normally match up with what you see on the checkout costs and your actual final costs. That isn't the case for Ryanair
Everyone has a first time travelling with Ryanair and some number of them will fall into this trap because they didn't know. This would be fine if people were intentionally making the choice to trade off the inconvenience (?) of checking in online vs at the airport but what % of people paying that fee did that? It would be easy for Ryanair to provide a more transparent customer experience here.
It should be noted that this happened only after public outrage after an ITV TV program aired. Too late for those who died, some by suicide because of the malicious and false prosecutions. The first compensation attempt was stymied by the Post Office's deliberately slow response (while reducing compensation) and most of the money went to legal fees.
The way the courts handled expert witness testimony from software developers, and also the way they are now criticising it, is some through the looking glass shit. Just completely clear that they have zero context or ability to evaluate reliability of testimony, or have the right structures in place to ensure that appropriate investigations have taken place, to the extent that I now have significantly less trust about the English court system's evaluation of any case with scientific or technical elements.
My experience generally (in the U.S.) is that our society is built from a collection of systems, that when viewed from a distance, appear to be functional. The closer you get to any one of those systems though, the more it will become clear how dysfunctional it is, how rarely it is doing the right thing, and how much it's just luck of the draw if you end up dealing with someone competent as opposed to a vindictive bully who will do everything in their power to hurt you if you press them to do the job their particular system is ostensibly responsible for.
> The closer you get to any one of those systems though, the more it will become clear how dysfunctional it is, how rarely it is doing the right thing,
An alternate explanation is that you’re only acknowledging the existence of these systems in your life when something goes wrong. You don’t notice the hundreds of different things that are going right every day because it’s working well.
How often does your power go out? How often is your water undrinkable? When you go the grocery store, is there always food on the shelves? Do you keep extra money in your wallet for the specific purpose of bribing government officials and police at every encounter?
The number of things that go right like clockwork in our modern life is actually astounding, given how complex the infrastructure and supply chains are. You just don’t think about it because it’s all background to you.
To really understand a dysfunctional society, visit a country where power, infrastructure, roads, and government offices don’t actually work regularly. Where you can’t get anything done without a bribe. It’s eye opening to see how many different things in a society can fail to function when most people aren’t interested in doing their job or being just. The US, although not perfect, is far from being as universally dysfunctional as you claim.
> how much it's just luck of the draw if you end up dealing with someone competent as opposed to a vindictive bully who will do everything in their power to hurt you
When the two options are “competent” or “vindictive bully who will do everything in their power to hurt you” that’s an extreme example of a false dichotomy.
How often are you encountering these “vindictive bullies who will do everything in their power to hurt you”? Are you just assuming they might exist and be out to get you, and that’s what bothers you?
I’ve seen this mentality show up in people who do a lot of doomscrolling of Reddit, Twitter, and other social media platforms that aggregate outrage stories from around the US. After consuming a collection of outrage stories from around the country every day for years on end, those upvoted outrage stories start to become the lens through which they view the world, despite how different it is from the reality they experience. It’s easy to start to mistake the outrage news headlines as normal life in America, rather than the newsworthy stories of something going wrong that made them headlines in the first place.
The Post Office certainly had to have known Fujitsu was lying. The Post Office had commissioned an external audit in 2003 that highlighted Horizon's flaws (which they buried).
It should also be noted that the key "experts" accuse the Post Office of misconduct.
Oh, I know a guy who’s primary living is from being an expert IT witness in the U.K. - he knows literally nothing about anything, such as “what is a database”, but does have a bunch of certifications from Microsoft and oracle.
None of them are terribly hard but some aren't trivial either, a couple took me a bit of thinking to work out. By far the most tedious part is inputting the result (I didn't bother after the first) which is definitely something AI is better at!
Sure, but what exactly was the criminal activity? Is the claim that she (or her close associates) engaged in it herself, or that she was acting purely as a launderer for others?
> Wen was ultimately arrested and convicted of one count of money laundering after two trials and acquittals on 10 other counts. She was not accused of involvement in the original alleged China fraud.
Customers for economy class seats are very price sensitive - if you were enjoying the experience then the airline wouldn't be cutting the services offered close enough to the bone to offer a competitive price.
You can pay for a slightly better experience, but it's very expensive!
The important thing is that it isn't based on the data you are attempting to analyse. It's fine to use subject matter expertise beforehand to decide on what is appropriate to include or not in your analysis.
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