Читать книгу The Failure of Risk Management - Douglas W. Hubbard - Страница 41

Outright math errors should be the most obvious disqualifiers of a method, and we will find them in some cases. This isn't just a matter of making simplifying assumptions or using shortcut rules of thumb. Those can be useful as long as there is at least empirical evidence that they are helpful. But where we deviate from the math, empirical evidence is even more important. This is especially true when deviations from known mathematics provide no benefits in simplicity compared to perfectly valid mathematical solutions—which is often the main case for taking mathematical shortcuts.

In some cases, it can be shown that mathematically irregular methods may actually lead to dangerously misguided decisions. For example, we shouldn't be adding and multiplying ordinal scales, as is done in many risk assessment methods. We will show later some formal analysis how such procedures lead to misguided conclusions.