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1shooner
11mo ago
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When I first heard the clinical idiom "When you hear hoof-beats, think horses not zebras" I thought it was a precautionary saying about the bias toward assuming the familiar. But it's meant to be instructive!
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TylerE
11mo ago
No, that’s backwards. It means what it says. When you see a symptom first look for the common things it could be, not the one in a million chance.
jxjnskkzxxhx
11mo ago
We have a formal description of this, it's called bayes theorem.
The Jordanian doctors just had poor priors.
tbihl
11mo ago
In this particular case, "when you see stripes with hoofbeats, think zebra, not horse with a paintjob"
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