I think something a lot of people miss about the “short-term chartist position” (these trends have continued until time t, so I should expect it to continue to time t+1) for an exponential that’s actually a sigmoid is that if you keep holding it, you’ll eventually be wrong exactly once.
Whereas if someone is “short-term chartist hater” (these trends always break, so I predict it’s going to break at time t+1) for an exponential that’s actually a sigmoid is that if you keep holding it, you’ll eventually be correct exactly once.
Now of course most chartists (myself included) want to be able to make stronger claims than just t+1, and people in general would love to know more about the world than just these trends. And if you’re really good at analysis and wise and careful and lucky you might be able to time the kink in the sigmoid and successfully be wrong 0 times, which is for sure a huge improvement over being wrong once! But this is very hard.
And people who ignore trends as a baseline are missing an important piece of information, and people who completely reject these trends are essentially insane.
A fallacy that can come out of this dynamic is for someone to notice that the “trend continues” people have been right almost all the time, and the “trend is going to stop soon” people are continuously wrong, and to therefore conclude that the trend will continue forever.
I think something a lot of people miss about the “short-term chartist position” (these trends have continued until time t, so I should expect it to continue to time t+1) for an exponential that’s actually a sigmoid is that if you keep holding it, you’ll eventually be wrong exactly once.
Whereas if someone is “short-term chartist hater” (these trends always break, so I predict it’s going to break at time t+1) for an exponential that’s actually a sigmoid is that if you keep holding it, you’ll eventually be correct exactly once.
Now of course most chartists (myself included) want to be able to make stronger claims than just t+1, and people in general would love to know more about the world than just these trends. And if you’re really good at analysis and wise and careful and lucky you might be able to time the kink in the sigmoid and successfully be wrong 0 times, which is for sure a huge improvement over being wrong once! But this is very hard.
And people who ignore trends as a baseline are missing an important piece of information, and people who completely reject these trends are essentially insane.
A fallacy that can come out of this dynamic is for someone to notice that the “trend continues” people have been right almost all the time, and the “trend is going to stop soon” people are continuously wrong, and to therefore conclude that the trend will continue forever.
This seems like a pretty unlikely fallacy, but I agree it’s theoretically possible (and ocassionally happens in practice).
The difference between 0 and 1 is significant! And it’s very valuable to figure out when the transition point happens, if you can.