Stuff that's not intuitive. Stuff that would seem so wrong on a quick glance that it never gets explored.
These are goldmines for exploring. I bet you know some stuff like that. Care to share it with us?
“[I told the fourth-graders] I was thinking of a number between 1 and 10,000. … They still cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes answer. This, of course, is the result of miseducation in which “right answers” are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say, “Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?” and I say yes, they cheer; if I say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of information in either case. The more anxious ones will, over and over again, ask questions that have already been answered, just for the satisfaction of hearing a yes.”
Notice the similarity? The lesson for me was that: action is information. (Positive or negative it's still useful.) If you keep this in mind it also helps realise that there are two sources of action, yourself and others -- both should be used to feed your mind.
The p-value method is practically a standard for scientific reporting in some fields. It also has some drastic shortcomings, including, e,g., dramatic instability for tests with only little data [2].
Naturally, people realize that and try to use additional tools and criteria when available. However, scientists are pretty brutally incentivized to publish positive results and, as a result, more often than it should be, too much weight is put on the single p-value criterion.
With issues like this in mind, in my opinion, it makes sense to be somewhat skeptical when seeing reports in the news that "A effects B" and definitely not to rush with the conclusions. Trivial, I know.
The [3] video pretty much sums it up and by all means is worth a watch.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value#Problems
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...
There are many cases where data is 0.06 or 0.055 but doesn't get a shiny little star.
And then there are cases where scientists just straight up don't understand stats (normality, sample size, what you can compare against, etc). A recent story highlighted that[1].
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, has good follow-up on what we CANNOT assume just because a study has a finding that has met the p-value criterion.
For example, you should definitely populate the dual channel, tri channel, or quad channel recommended. However, if you populate the second set of DIMMs on an Intel platform you'll get slower memory performance. So your 1333 MHz memory will end up being 1066, or your 1066 will be 800. You'll notice this resultant speed of course, but you won't realize it's bad until you have a second server with a slightly different memory configuration.
Additionally, there are situations where a hex core will have reduced throughput over a similarly clocked quad core, particularly if it's IO constrained for either memory (see #1) or disk.
If your check this on your servers and swap out the memory, and application speeds up because of this tidbit, please let me know :) I think this qualifies as non-intuitive because unless you're a sysadmin you wouldn't think to optimize this part of your hardware in your stack.
> Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 about 30% of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than 5% of the time. This distribution of first digits is the same as the widths of gridlines on the logarithmic scale.
> This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude.
Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law
Not computer related but i find it fascinating that so many people do something one way, and are totally shocked, mind-blown to find out that it can be done another way too.
I've also been battling for my life with a serious medical condition. I have essentially beaten it and no longer have chronic pain, am no longer on boatloads of medication, etc. The condition is very deadly, so the standard medical response is to break out the big guns and nuke the body in order to kill off deadly infections. Having recovered from the sexual abuse I endured, I pursued the opposite approach of gently supporting my body -- feeding it right, removing problems from my environment and so on. The body is the battleground on which this war takes place and the response of throwing ever stronger drugs at the problem is part of what kills people like me (news that is very unwelcome to the ears of most people with my diagnosis).
It's also a proven negotiation tactic to back down, make concessions and work on earning trust rather than constantly escalating until things get ugly (like war is declared).