Rather, McKay and Bar-Natan are making a potent point about the power of wiggle room. Wiggle room is what the Baltimore stockbroker has when he gives himself plenty of chances to win; wiggle room is what the mutual fund company has when it decides which of its secretly incubating funds are winners and which are trash. Wiggle room is what McKay and Bar-Natan used to work up a list of rabbinical names that jibed well with War and Peace. When you’re trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.
Read this chapter whenever you do any kind of machine learning.
