On Thu, 2002-08-01 at 10:32, David Schwartz wrote:

	No matter how many proofs you have or how good they are, I won't believe it 
because this fails the giggle test. Here's a simple counter-proof. I want to 
write an SQL server from scratch. I create two teams, one with $50,000 and 
one with $5,000,000. You can honestly tell me that it's equally like that 
either team will produce a higher quality SQL server?

Intuition is misleading. It mostly depends which of the teams has the
good engineers and smart management. The .com bust is just one example
of that.

	This reminds me of the proofs that supposedly showed that locking up 
convicted criminals for longer didn't lower the crime rate. Are we honestly 
supposed to believe that otherwise honest people commit more crimes to make 
up the difference?

In some cases yes. There are a whole variety of well understood reasons
why this occurs - probability of capture not length of capture is the
deterrent. Most criminals won't reoffend after a short or long sentence
(and there is little evidence that length of sentence decreases the
probability of reoffence. In addition there is a category of crime (that
involving a dispute between two parties) where one person being sent to
jail causes their entire family and relations to become 'criminals'. 

I don't however see the relationship between the two, other than both
being demonstrations that you must do the actual science and statistics
before you rely on intuition.