And human capital would be expanding by having schools focus on the long lower tail of under-achievement instead of meeting targets which cause schools to focus on pushing marginal students over arbitrary thresholds.
"It is scandalous that some commissioners continue to restrict access to cataract surgery through the use of arbitrary thresholds, and that they do so without a robust evidence base and without being able to demonstrate that they will not harm patients," said Steve Winyard, head of campaigns at the charity RNIB.
Furthermore, the size of geographic hospital markets is frequently driven by arbitrary thresholds.
Following O'Brien (2007), arbitrary thresholds (e.g. 4 or 10) used to eliminate a variable were not applied, and the variance of the regression coefficients were viewed in context.
Heuristic decision rules (e.g. feasibility rules) in principle act as surrogates for utility maximisation or distributional concerns, yet in practice may neglect costs and benefits, be based on arbitrary thresholds, and be prone to gaming.
Using quantiles instead of arbitrary thresholds (e.g. over 1 million inhabitants) avoided the possible bias caused by the general increase of city sizes over time, and therefore the incomparability of city-systems from one period to the other.
This approach uses several arbitrary thresholds (e.g. 300 °C for the maximum temperature composite image, Fig. 2c) based on rough trial and error, and these thresholds could be improved with a more rigorous optimization.
"We must continue to seek to reduce our impacts on the global ecology without undue attention on trying to avoid arbitrary thresholds".
So rather than having arbitrary thresholds for diversity, maybe it's preferable for festivals to include diversity alongside other values – fun, integrity, artistry and so on – as one of the defining aspects of a festival.
It also uses arbitrary thresholds to define aberrant regions.
However, even WHO's categories are arbitrary thresholds, inserted as round numbers in a continuum.
