Talk:Garbage in, garbage out
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Quotations
[edit]The heading of the Computer Stupidities web page has this quotation from Charles Babbage:
I have frequently been asked by Members of Parliament, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I have not been able to fully comprehend the level of stupidity needed to ask this question.
Should this be mentioned here? It sounds like a good analogy to GIGO.
"sound arguments can lead to unsound conclusions if their premises are flawed"
[edit]This isn't correct if "soundness" is meant in a technical sense: "an argument is sound if it is both valid in form and its premises are true." Currently, this sentence reads:
> The principle applies to all logical argumentation: sound arguments can lead to unsound conclusions if their premises are flawed.
Would there be any objections to rewriting it as follows?
> The principle applies to all logical argumentation: a valid argument with false premises may have a false conclusion. 98.152.158.27 (talk) 17:22, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
Severely questionable introduction
[edit]The introductory section in its entirety reads as follows:
"In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, or nonsense (garbage) input data produces nonsense output. Rubbish in, rubbish out (RIRO) is an alternate wording.
"The principle applies to all logical argumentation: soundness implies validity, but validity does not imply soundness."
It is the last sentence that I find to be utterly confusing: Virtually no one knows what (if anything) is the difference between the two words "soundness" and "validity".
Above all, it is totally unclear what these two words have to do with the GIGO principle, because this summary sentence contains no reference to either input or to output.
For that reason, the second sentence is a very poor way of summarizing this principle for the introductory section.
I hope that someone knowledgeable about this subject can improve this section (and, I hope, remove the last sentence). -- 18:21, 11 November 2023 2601:200:c082:2ea0:6c58:45dd:a546:1959
- Validity means a formally correct argument where the conclusions follow from the premises by the rules of deduction/logic. It has nothing to do with relevance to the real world... AnonMoos (talk) 23:17, 11 November 2023 (UTC)