I’ve seen it used as “here’s how rigorous my methodology was”, and that seems meaningful. I can be very confident in something based on vibes alone[1], or I can run a series of intensive statistical tests and still be somewhat shaky about the apparent conclusion[2].
“I’ve trained a random forest classifier on several thousand amateur boxing matches, and got 95 percent accuracy on my validation set after making sure there was no cross contamination. The resulting model says that the fellow with the big glasses is likely to win a bout against the guy in the tank top, but I still wouldn’t put money on it.”
I’ve seen it used as “here’s how rigorous my methodology was”, and that seems meaningful. I can be very confident in something based on vibes alone[1], or I can run a series of intensive statistical tests and still be somewhat shaky about the apparent conclusion[2].
“That guy in the black T-shirt looks mean, I bet he could win a fight against that guy in the leather jacket.”
“I’ve trained a random forest classifier on several thousand amateur boxing matches, and got 95 percent accuracy on my validation set after making sure there was no cross contamination. The resulting model says that the fellow with the big glasses is likely to win a bout against the guy in the tank top, but I still wouldn’t put money on it.”