Comment by HoneyTea420 on 90% of anything should be bad (& the precision-recall tradeoff) · 2022-09-15T08:02:19.451Z · LW · GW

Sorry if this is obvious and stupid to point out, but when you say "anything", I'm always bothered at where to draw the actual line. It seems like the more specific the thing is, the less this applies:

• 90% of this post is not crap.
• 90% of Tarkovsky movies are not crap.
• 90% of the restaurants in my area are not crap.
• 90% of the people I meet are not crappy or boring.

And so on. Of course, these are filtered examples and maybe most of the unpublished stuff was shit, but I still have a problem with words like "anything/everything/always". That said, I really liked your article, and agree that there's no reason to interpret this stuff pessimistically.