Two of the most powerful words ever

@rocray  ...yup, the concept of 'what if' covers a lot of....Options.

Battered 'Bot, fry capable...*yum*

Voting is still open for the 2021 Darwin Awards.  

I understand the concept of "what if" I don’t use it. Instead I ask "what are the factors" and develop a list. From the list a group of experiments are developed which will tell what the "Magnitude" of each factor is. Once you know the magnitude of the factors you can use them for design work.

@audio-union

Yes. Similar in econometrics (and time series analysis) where it is dangerous to include variables (factors) just to see "what if".

There must be a causal relationship, otherwise statistically significant correlations that are totally spurious and silly can be surprisingly easy to find.

This problem is exacerbated by many levels of magnitude with the popularity of A.I. and neural networks which can easily lead to data-mining. Because they are "dumb".

And they asked him, who are you? He replied "I AM"

What if posts like this didn't make me reach the "blah blah blah" point sooner rather than later?