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Content Tagged with User:jerryk + performance

Claims, benchmarks, or (even worse) “research papers” claiming to compare the performance of two things, usually making some definitive, strong and universally quantified statement in favor of one or the other despite:

• Making totally irrelevant apples to razor blades comparisons;
• Showing total statistical illiteracy in the analysis of results (two distributions with the same mean are obviously the same right? There are no other interesting moments to consider);
• Using one of the systems under comparison in such an inappropriate, unnatural, or bizarre manner that only a huckster or complete numbnuts would contrive to do so (quite deliberately in one case, quite mouth-breathingly in the other);
• More than one of the above.

Usually the inanity of these pieces of work is rivaled only by their smugness, something that would be hard to sustain if what one was saying was more obvious in its isomorphism to:

• “I mowed the lawn with my Porsche and it made an awful mess… clearly it’s a terrible machine relative to my Toro Lawninatrix 2000.”

or…

• “I tried brushing my teeth with a Husqvarna chainsaw and the results were clearly inferior to those obtained with my Sonicare.”

or…

• “Wow this supposed to be real-time, 3D, ray traced first person shooter I wrote in Prolog really sucks—-what a stupid language.”

One of these crimes against reason can be remedied by taking to heart some of the advice here. The cures for some of the others are less obvious, but it’s possible that chainsaw would come in handy.