There's an implicit model I think many people have in their heads of how everyone else behaves. As George Box is often quoted, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I’m going to try and make the implicit model explicit, talk a little about what it would predict, and then talk about why this model might be wrong.

Here's the basic idea: A person's behavior falls on a bell curve.

1.

Adam is a new employee at Ratburgers, a fast food joint crossed with a statistics bootcamp. It's a great company, startup investors have been going wild for machine learning in literally anything, you've been tossing paper printouts of Attention Is All You Need into the meatgrinder so you can say your hamburgers are made with AI. Anyway, you weren’t around for Adam's hiring, you haven’t seen his resume, you have no information about him when you [...]