When someone distorts or replaces the true meaning of things, it is always terrible.
With the same meaning, you can take any completely harmless thing and submit an instrument of evil. And write a book about it.
I never really liked Mark Twain, sorry.
Thanks to such writers, now every second person calls white black, referring to his frivolous passages.
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Whether you like or donât like Mark Twain, is really quite irrelevant to the argument about the possible shortcomings of peoplesâ use of statistics. (And you donât have to apologize for not liking Twain (âsorryâ) because I really couldnât care less. I think Mark Twain would probably argue that skepticism is generally healthy, and one should not always take things at face value, including what âstatisticsâ tell us. To suggest that Mark Twain is the reason that âevery second person calls white black,â is, actually, a gross, and probably, incorrect exaggeration. The vast majority of people are probably not even aware of Mr. Twainâs quote on statistics, so to blame him for peopleâs beliefs is really a bit much.
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Take monthly statistics and check the share of registered postcards by month. You will get roughly the same distribution.
https://www.postcrossing.com/stats/postcards
In my opinion, in modern terms, Mark Twain is an ordinary troll, and of course all of his quotes are ironic and satirical. To be honest, it is completely uninteresting to me, since it has nothing to do with the subject of Postcrossing statistics.
And how to deceive people with the help of statistics, letâs leave it on the conscience of Mark Twain and his books.
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Yes, Mark Twain was just an âordinary troll,â an ordinary troll who wrote, for example, Huckleberry Finn, considered by some to be the âGreat American Novel.â And yes, Iâm sure youâre right, âallâ of Mr. Twainâs quotes, every last one of them, was âironic and satirical.â
As far as the limitations of statistics, one quick real-world example, before I go: In 2016, the majority of âexpertâ pundits predicted, almost overwhelmingly, through âstatistical analysis,â that Hillary Clinton would win the Presidential election. We all know how that turned out.
Predicting the future is very difficult. Future events are not a train and it does not run exactly on schedule. All predictions are probabilistic.
Moreover, not all influencing factors are of the same strength. And the strenght changes during time.
It should also be borne in mind that life (or the stock market) are non-ergodic processes. And even not significant factors can radically change the direction of their development. There is such a term - the butterfly effect, which, in my opinion, came from a book by another american author, Ray Bradbury.
In addition to mathematical statistics, there are a number of complex disciplines that the analysts you mentioned have not the slightest idea about - the theory of dynamic chaos, the theory of transient response processes, the theory of feedback circuits, etc.
Therefore, I will not undertake to comment on why Hillary Clinton lost, and even more so why all the analysts went wrong. By the way, not all analysts were mistaken. Some hit the bullâs-eye 
When we say about writers, I admire visionaries. And those who covertly call other people fools, I consider them narrow-minded people.
This is why I love science fiction and hate social satire.
In the first case, the authors expand our horizons of vision, and in the second they simply pour out their accumulated bile on us. Criticism is not bad at all. But the world owes its progress not to critics, but to visionaries.
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âVisionaryâ writers like Mark Twain, who, for example, owned one of the first typewriters, invested in new technology, and shared a friendship and mutual admiration with Nikola Tesla, perhaps one of the greatest visionaries of all.
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If Mark Twain had not yet written all sorts of nonsense about statistics, then he would have no price at all. And so in my rating, he takes the penultimate place, alas.
And pls donât confuse visionaries and investors
The motivation of the visionaries is the uppermost levels of Maslowâs pyramid, and the motivation of the investors is the elementary greed or ROI if you wish.
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A person who has 3 patents to their name is definitely not just an investor who dumps money just for the profit.
Actually, I have used the Twain quote a lot during the pandemic, when incomplete data was misrepresented purposefully for varying agendas - or analysis was done clumsily without proper understanding. This does not imply all âstatisticsâ are lies, and Iâm stumped why anyone would use this interpretation of the quote in the first place.
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Actually, I didnât confuse visionaries and investors at all. Not all investors are motivated purely by greed; some simply believe in the potential of the product, or the âvisionâ of its developer, and they want to see it brought to fruition. By the same token, some investors will refuse to invest in a product, even if it will likely make them money; âgreenâ investors, for example, will not invest in products that are not environmentally friendly. So no, itâs not only about greed.
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Ok.
At the moment â100 = 265. The Health of Poscrossing (or its Activity) is going up and it is 40% now.
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Would stagnation not be caused by people not requesting addresses to post. I have sent all the slots Iâm allowed âŚany delay in delivery is just how it goes/or is it taking longer , hence slowing down the whole machine ?covid/economy ?
I always try to reduce mail from mid November to the beginning/middle of January because the mail service here in Italy is in chaos during those months. Many letters get lost (I have actually two Christmas cards sent at the end of November for friends in Italy that have not been delivered yet!!!)
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At the moment â100 = 266. The Health of Poscrossing (or its Activity) is going up and it is 45% now.
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At the moment â100 = 276. The Health of Poscrossing (or its Activity) is going up and it is 90% now!
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Letâs see how it will go after recent rows and schisms.
All I know is postcards go out, postcards come in, and I can max out at 62.
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I have been watching the 60 Days Postcrossing ranking for a long time. And I already wrote here above that the value of the tail of the ranking (#100) well determines the activity of the game.
And now, as in every spring (namely, from the end of February and the whole of March), Postcrossing activity is as high as ever.
Rigt now #100 = 282, which means Postcrossing Health is 100%.
BUT!
Comparing the ranking curve for today February 28, 2023 and February 29, 2020, I noticed to my surprise that it has changed geometry.
The tail is still well in line with Postcrossingâs seasonal activity. But the nose of the curve (the most superactive players) is noticeably lower than the values that should be.
Earlier in the 19-20s, when I actively monitored it, the curve were going up and down completely and in parallel.
In the 21-22s, I took the curve sample only a few times and already then noticed that it began to change the geometry, but I did not attach any importance to this, writing it off as an error associated with COVID.
But now it can be clearly stated that the TOP-70 most active postcrossers for 60 days in 2023 noticeably lose to the TOP-70 most active postcrossers in 2019-2020.
These are NOT the same postcrossers in the rankings. They are changing. These are the places in the ranking.
What could be the reason for this drop in the TOP-70?
What ideas do you have?
PS One more curve samples.
I found curvesapmles for close December dates of 2019 and 2020.
And the trend is the same.
The nose of the 2020 curve is below 2019.
Tails are about equal. But due to the low activity of Postcrossing in winter, the tails at the end of December are lower than at the end of February.
I have an explanation for this phenomenon.
But I will express it when you, friends, share your thoughts.
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My immediate thought to explain the change in curve shape is that there are fairly global economic forces at the momentâglobal inflation, countries going into recession, and so forth. People who are generally at the top of the activity curve can save more by reducing their activity than those at the lower end of the curve (i.e. if sending a postcard costs you $5/card, and you go from sending 8 cards per week to sending 4 cards per week, thatâs $20/week less, whereas if you go from sending 2 cards per week to 1 card per week itâs only $5/week less, so it might not feel as necessary to slow down).
Similarly, if there was a usually very active country whose postal costs went up, you might get the same kind of effect (like if Germany for example doubled their postage rates, you might expect German postcrossers, who seem more active in general, to become less active, while less active countries stay at the same levels, shifting the shape of the curve).
Those are my two guesses. Iâd be interested to know if segmenting the data further by country reveals anything.
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12 months ago Russia invaded Ukraine
Ukraine was a large active postcrossing community.
Since then many countries cannot exchange with Russia.
China pretty much ground to a halt with no addresses being given out.
We have all noticed a slowdown - cards taking longer to travel.
Iâm guessing its in there somewhere 
this strange pattern of behaviour must have had an impactâŚ
Possibly most on those who send most ?
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