That’s so cool: just occurred to me it’s like the inverse of crowdsourcing. No one guesses the right weight of the cow, but the average of all guesses is almost exactly the right weight.
Well, here you never know the weight of the cow, per se. If the weight-of-cow question were asked, it would "If you were asked to guess the weight of some cow, do you believe you would overestimate it?" And then you find out, that, 63% other people share your self-evaluation, or else do not. There is no info about any actual cow.
To take the spherical-cow analogy further, this article is a bit like responding to a headline of "New non-spherical cow shape way more efficient than spherical shape, promises free milk for everyone!" by doing an approximation with a spherical cow.
Particularly when a tiny bit of googling turns up actual numbers claimed for the cow in the experiment.
It's a spherical cow conversation. The cows you hire can be placed in a smooth manifold of job difficulty and you have a predictable prediction of the job performance distribution.
It would be nice to repeat the maps using weight. The weight of a cow is like 700Kg (1500 pounds) and the weight of a chicken is like 3Kg (6 pounds). So a cow is like 250 chickens. (Can someone with CGI abilities make a gros image of a cow made of 250 chickens?)
Nope! Napkin math will treat all cows as spherical. However, if they are traveling and meeting way more people, it's also likely they are spreading it far more in addition to having it at a higher rate than the more socially distant segment of the population. Also, would likely indicate vast amounts of community spread that is going completely undetected.
Actually this gives me an idea for a spherical-cow Farmville clone in which all cows are simulated with simple yet physically justifiable parameters...
I would agree that the real world can bait one in the ass, out of the blue, just, what the, things are trying to eat my ass!
As for herding spherical cows and the vacuum, I'll do my best:
val maybeCow = Some(1) // SomeOne is the speherical mu (i.e. you)
maybeCow getOrElse 0 // Cow here becomes 1 with the universe
Were maybeCow initialized with a None value, then into the vacuum it goes...and out it comes with a safe 0 to keep order in our [application] universe.
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