Game respects game. They can spot a poser a mile away.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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And yet, when the resident with the highest rate of correctly identifying impostors insists that the head psychiatrist is a reptoid, he is pooh-poohed.
Makes sense, staff has relatively limited contact with patients compared to the other patients, and outside of research, what healthy person would get themselves admitted to a psychiatric hospital on purpose?
It does point to how difficult psychiatric diagnosis is, though. Though other medical fields tend to have the opposite problem, they tend to treat patients with real medical, non-psychological issues as pretenders or people with psychosomatic issues if it's not immediately obvious that they have a real medical issue.
Patients lying about symptoms have been a medical issue for centuries. It is the main topic of Baudrillard's philosophical analysis on simulacra and simulation. Think about it, a soldier who doesnt want to be deployed starts simulating symptoms of a disease to be discharged. How would you catch him, can you? The answer seems straight forward, until you scrutinize it in detail. Neither military or medical knowledge actually have an answer. The kid who doesn't want to go to school says he has a headache and a tummy ache. How do you validate another's conscious and sensory experience? Hypochondriacs affirm to develop every disease they hear about. People under stress feel and have somatic symptoms akin to physical diseases, even when functionally nothing is wrong with them. Etcetera. Disease and diagnosis are not so simple and straight forward, not even when talking about bodily functions.
It's why objective testing parameters are so damn important.
Huh, how accurate/precise (I always mix them up) were the real patients? Did they just identify every other patient as an imposter?
This shows the difference between accuracy and precision.
Thank you.
Accuracy is about the abilty to hit a specific target, Precision is about being able to repeat it.
There's also a difference between not knowing the difference and always getting them mixed up. The diagram doesn't help with the stated problem. Also, it doesn't address the question.
You're not wrong, but visuals often help so it doesn't hurt to share. I remember this picture when I need to differentiate the two terms, but some people use mnemonics or other memory devices.
The high accuracy, low precision regime seems so strange to me! I think not many would call that situation “high accuracy” with most of the shots missing the bullseye!
Plus it seems like if you just keep increasing accuracy, you necessarily force all the shots to converge on the bullseye, don’t you? Then you get precision “for free” which is strange!
If you average out the low precision, high accuracy shots you will get a single point as your result. If that point is not already in the dead centre, then increasing accuracy is simply a matter of shifting that point closer to it. You can do that without increasing precision by moving the entire shot spread in that direction.
I've found this analogy often confuses people because in the shooting world the terminology is a little different. There the high precision spread would be considered high accuracy, with it only being a matter of adjusting the sights to get it on centre. And nobody is winning a shooting competition by arguing that the average of their shot spread is in the centre.
Yeah I get that the centre of the distribution is on the bullseye, it just doesn’t fit with the ordinary meaning of the word “accurate.”
It also falls apart with a small sample size. If I fire only a single shot and hit the bullseye, that doesn’t tell you anything. However, in everyday speech most people would describe that as an accurate shot.
Sometimes the visual example doesn't work well when describing math. So an alternate:
Pick a number 1 - 10. 8. Correct and accurate.
Pick a number 1 - 10. 3.1415926535. Uhh, precise, but not accurate.
Or:
Accurate is drilling the hole in the middle. Precise is picking the exact right size drill bit.
I’d be interested in consistency too.
Call that peer reviewed diagnosis
Raising questions about anything at work only gets you more work.