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Now it's time for the devil's advocate-- if the title was "some people get in a lot of accidents", would the top comment be "actually it's more likely that insurance fraud is the answer"


That doesn't really matter. I mean, sure, I could look at this data and say "hmm, looks like insurance fraud to me."

But the point being, I really don't have evidence one way or the other. Implying insurance fraud is saying you think a criminal act occurred, and when you say something like that the burden should be on you to provide some evidence to that effect.

Random internet commenters bullshit all the time. But this blog post provides specific data and an unambiguous conclusion that fraud occurred (the title does not hedge, it is "We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data"), so if you do something like that you need to provide evidence for it. I appreciate the parent commenter for pointing out that, despite all of their data, they didn't really provide much evidence for their conclusion.


Exactly this. When I open a post like this I get excited because I think I'm either about to learn something interesting about data analysis, or I'm about to see a neat application of a technique that I already know about and it's going to make me happy.

When the post actually boils down to "hey if you look at a large dataset then you'll find unusual events in it, now visit our AI startup!" then that irritates me enough to whine about it in the comments.


No, because insurance fraud is vastly less likely.

It's the same reason I don't assume memory bits flipped by solar radiation are the most likely cause of my bugs.

These are not symmetrical claims.


For what it's worth, the headline here does NOT say "we find it more likely than not that there is evidence of insurance fraud in our crash data".


i have absolutely no problem with that, i suspect that no matter the title, whoever has a contrarian opinion to it will be the one to speak up while the rest remain silent




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