The Sheldon scale...created by a theif?

Discussion in 'Coin Chat' started by fish4uinmd, Jul 22, 2017.

  1. halfcent1793

    halfcent1793 Well-Known Member

    The scale goes from 1-70 because when he wrote the book, a perfect uncirculated early large cent sold for about 70 times what the same variety in barely identifiable condition sold for. That's all it means.
     
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  3. jester3681

    jester3681 Exonumia Enthusiast

    While we're at it, let's get the US on the metric system. :wacky:
     
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  4. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    I have to be bluntly honest here. This thread bugs me a little. We were once a people who could keep things separate, siloed if you prefer. Now, we're professional fulltime "outrage machines". Find something miserable and deplorable about a guy and you get to dismiss and throw away any unrelated good he ever did. That stuff needs to stop! Sorry, but it just does. Recognize that smart people are VERY OFTEN deeply flawed people as well. It's the human condition. Just because a guy did horrendous things, AS MANY IN HISTORY HAVE, that doesn't mean they also cannot have done things of value.

    Who was the co-inventor of the VW Beetle?
    Who was the conceptual designer of the modern multi-lane restricted access highway?

    He was a VERY bad man.
     
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  5. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    This may be one of the most brilliant things I've ever read on CT. Bravisimo! This is exactly my indictment of our fascination with "big data" and data mining. The whole works is excused correlation analysis without even a passing wave at causation analysis. Mark my words - in due time, modern "big data" will come to be seen as every bit as evil as eugenics. If not, shame on all of us.
     
  6. -jeffB

    -jeffB Greshams LEO Supporter

    I'm not seeing it. Yes, correlations are what the tools turn up -- but it's pretty hard to find causation without first finding a correlation. A better and more powerful way to turn up subtler correlations becomes a better tool for getting to causes.

    Of course it can be abused. But it's the way humans (and everything else that seems to think) has done it from time immemorial. That's how we get superstitions, and prejudices, and... erm, quite a lot of things best not mentioned here.
     
  7. halfcent1793

    halfcent1793 Well-Known Member

    I'm not equating Sheldon with Hitler.

    He did write a very good book about large cents, and it was instrumental in building up the field, though large cents had already been studied for nearly 100 years when he wrote it. They're still getting a lot of attention.

    It is not in no way fault the ANA adapted his pricing scale for large cents as a grading scale for every US coin. That was driven by greed and happened independently of Sheldon about the time he died. Whatever outrage I have about this is towards those who misappropriated his scale for grading all US coins.

    That said, he misused quantitative science in both numismatics and psychology. His pricing scale was a pseudoscience as was his somatotype research. Since both projects were wrong in the same way, I think it is completely legitimate to discuss them together.
     
  8. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    I agree the correlation is the first step, and a necessary one, but I see them again becoming so utterly fascinating to the data industry, that we have mistakenly started to treat them as a tangible PRODUCT, and that is sheer madness.

    I'm sorry, Jeff, if you're in that biz, no offense intended, but the "big data" era and industry just strike me as just about as evil, on the potential side, as anything else going right now.

    Remember, A has a high correlation with B, does not mean A causes B. B might cause A, and A and B might both have cause C. And that's ONLY the simplest case. It gets better still. Yes, my "business", politics, especially the kind practiced by court-related departments, is perhaps the BIGGEST abuser of correlations. The "risk assessment" tools they use are just thinly veiled cultural "genocide" tools. They are self-accelerating positive feedback loops that create the very thing they are intending to assess the likelihood of.
     
    Last edited: Jul 24, 2017
  9. BooksB4Coins

    BooksB4Coins Newbieus Sempiterna

    Well said.

    I agree; it does need to stop, not only here but everywhere. While not directed at anyone in particular, those who feel the need to judge one's achievements based solely upon some unconnected aspect of their character really should take a nice long look in the mirror before doing so; anyone remember the old truism about living in glass houses? All too often, especially when in the national spotlight, those quickest to condemn others also just happen to have closets overflowing with bones.
     
  10. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    This is a tremendously valuable point. The entire numerical system we use for coin grading is about as arbitrary as it could be. And that's actually a good thing, because any attempt to explain it as anything more intellectually rigorous instantly reveals the very sloppy underpinnings of the whole subject matter.

    Sausage, legislation, and coin grading systems. Only those with very strong stomachs should look at how they come to be. And that second one has me about ready to hurl (blow chunks, technicolor yawn) right now in my state!
     
    Last edited: Jul 24, 2017
  11. beef1020

    beef1020 Junior Member

    Getting a bit off topic, but a couple of you may be interested, and it happens to be an area I am familiar with. When talking about and using ‘Big Data’ it’s important to keep in mind that it has very large potential benefits while also being easily abused and misused. I don’t think most people appreciate this conceptually, but where it’s most valuable is in generating more accurate estimates as opposed to finding subtle new causations/correlations.

    For example, if we know that some behavior increases your risk of cancer but the confidence bounds of our estimate place that increased risk between 120% and 600% then we may not be able to act on that information. Along comes big data, and now instead of a study with 10,000 people we have one with 2.6 million people, we can use it to lower our confidence bounds and get an estimate of 530% to 560% increase risk. Programs that improve health at an increased risk above 400% can now be implemented whereas before we couldn’t be sure of their value.

    Again, the premise here is that big data increases our fidelity, which is often valuable, but not revolutionary or game changing. The size of the signal you can find is related to the amount of noise in your data, lots of noise means you can only find big signals, less noise allows you to see small signals. As we move along to lower and lower noise levels, big data is giving us insights into smaller and smaller signals, however these smaller signals are also less valuable. In the field of medical research I work, these small signals we can now find are just not that important. We are looking for what increases risk by a factor of 2 to 3, or higher, i.e. smoking for basically all cancers, BRCA for breast cancer, HPV status for cervical cancer. Now we can see things like slight decrease in risk for women who breast feed, but the risk reduction is 4.3%. How do you develop a public health program that incorporates that risk reduction. I believe this may be the tie in for @V. Kurt Bellman, Big data in and of itself is not bad, unfortunately people have shown a history of misusing whatever tools they have at their disposal.
     
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  12. tommyc03

    tommyc03 Senior Member

    Very thoughtful on my quote and I thank you for the positive reply.
     
  13. tommyc03

    tommyc03 Senior Member

    You are, of course, correct. I was getting a bit carried away and I'm taking a step back as I agree with you.
     
  14. BooksB4Coins

    BooksB4Coins Newbieus Sempiterna

    I'd like to think most of us understood what you meant, so any seemingly "less positive" responses were made in the most general sense and not directed towards you.
     
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  15. V. Kurt Bellman

    V. Kurt Bellman Yes, I'm blunt! Get over your "feeeeelings".

    Bingo-roonie, there ol' Carne-Diez-Veinte! Social scientists are the chronic abusers. You'd think they'd know better! They hammered into our heads in undergrad school the danger of assuming a cause from a correlation, but we had no computer courses per se. I submit if you're adding all this IT, and not changing the credit-hours for the degree, something else is getting left out. I fear it is the healthy skepticism for correlations.
     
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