@Sycorax That's an interesting problem; classifying too early vs waiting too long. Have you found any applicability of optimal stopping theory to this tradeoff?
@Sycorax: reminds me of the story of the car mechanic that gave the malfunctioning engine one solid THUMP with his hammer, whereupon the engine ran again and the mechanic wrote a 500$ invoice. The customer did not understand how one THUMP could cost so much. The mechanic then itemized the invoice: one THUMP, 10$. Knowing where to THUMP, 490$.
2
... I think that a key aspect of expertise is having a large assortment of tools at our disposal, and knowing when to use which tool. Unfortunately, all the customer (and the novice data scientist) sees is us picking up a single tool and using it. The hard-won experience that allowed us to select the appropriate tool, or the thought processes that went into the selection, are invisible.
2
Something completely different: gold tag badge holders can unilaterally close a question as a duplicate. Sometimes I feel like this unilateral closure privilege should also apply to the "unclear what you are asking" closure reason (or, as it now reads more charitably, "needs more details"). I assume something like this would need to be done network-wise... any thoughts? Set up a meta question for discussion?
