Keeping the Faith: How to Find Strength When You Run out of Answers

No matter how studied, you will eventually run out of answers.

Greg Rakozy

 

BEARING THE IMAGE of God has its perks.

We are capable of creativity, one of the Almighty's key traits. In the history of humanity, God first appears as creator, materializing the universe with mere words. When you read a novel, watch a thrilling film, or explore some architectural marvel, you enjoy the product of creativity.

Language is another differentiator among created beings. You're reading a message which is an encoding from your past (my present) containing my thoughts. As you read these words, your mind decodes them to derive meaning. It's an incredible transaction and a talent we share with our creator.

A third perk (among others) is our ability to reason and think in the abstract. God has granted us the gift of intellect. We can consider alternate realities, we can reverse engineer, and we can understand cause and effect.

And yet, as smart as we may think we have become, this third perk can also manifest as a curse.

Life's Not as Fair as We Think It Should Be

Yes, the innocent do perish.

Rendy Novantino

 

DATA SCIENTISTS WORRY about underfitting, a phenomenon in which a formula predicts outcomes using limited inputs.

As you can imagine, this results in output errors because the underfit model fails to account for a wide enough variety of possibilities.

Underfitting, then, is essentially an oversimplification of a causal relationship based on insufficient data points. One example, spelled out by the AI wizards at DataRobot, is the correlation between sales and advertising:

An underfitted model may suggest that you can always make better sales by spending more on marketing when in fact the model fails to capture a saturation effect (at some point, sales will flatten out no matter how much more you spend on marketing).

So while it's generally true that spending more money on advertising will yield increased sales, at some point marketers will see diminishing returns on investment. The underfit model might suggest a straight line when, in reality, the model should look something more like a logarithmic function, curving upwards until flattening out at a certain point.

In a similar way we see Eliphaz, in the fourth chapter of Job, underfitting one of his proverbs; he attempts to derive a universal truth from a generally true axiom.