Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity

A Blogtitle from Emanual Derman's Blog.


It came to my mind when I read the Stupid Data Miner Tricks article in "Forbes" - How Quants Fool Themselves and The Economic Indicator in Your Pants.
And I refer to Beware Wind from a post in my Mathematica Plugged Blog.
We like to see patterns and we like to interpret them. But we need to know that the danger of falling into traps is much higher when we try to extract knowledge or meaning from data.
As the Forbes article started: There sometimes seems to be no limit to how far people will go to make financial data scream.
Interpretations can be immensely clever, incredibly stupid, a joke?