In Calling Bullshit, the authors give the example of the Virginia Mason Quality Equation Q = [Ax(O+S)÷W]
I read somewhere (maybe in Thinking, Fast and Slow?), that formulas like this can actually be surprisingly effective, even though the units don’t make sense, because they encode an intuition but prevent you from putting your finger on the scale when applying it, by mixing in other biases. IIRC, the studies on this found that trying to tune these formulas by adding in weights tended to make them worse, which is especially surprising.
I’ll have to see if I can dig up the reference on this.
Comments
I read somewhere (maybe in Thinking, Fast and Slow?), that formulas like this can actually be surprisingly effective, even though the units don’t make sense, because they encode an intuition but prevent you from putting your finger on the scale when applying it, by mixing in other biases. IIRC, the studies on this found that trying to tune these formulas by adding in weights tended to make them worse, which is especially surprising.
I’ll have to see if I can dig up the reference on this.