bill comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Yvain 21 July 2009 04:04AM

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Comment author: bill 22 July 2009 09:22:43PM 11 points [-]

Some students started putting zeros on the first assignment or two. However, all they needed was to see a few people get nailed putting 0.001 on the right answer (usually on the famous boy-girl probability problem) and people tended to start spreading their probability assignments. Some people never learn, though, so once in a while people would fail. I can only remember three in eight years.

My professor ran a professional course like this. One year, one of the attendees put 100% on every question on every assignment, and got every single answer correct. The next year, someone attended from the same company, and decided he was going to do the same thing. Quite early, he got minus infinity. My professor's response? "They both should be fired."

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 July 2009 05:05:09AM 26 points [-]

I cannot begin to say how vehemently I disagree with the idea of firing the first attendee. If I found out that your professor had fired them I would fire your professor.

Sure, it has to be an expected utility fail if you take the problem literally, because of how little it would have cost to put only 99.99% on each correct answer, and how impossible it would be to be infinitely certain of getting every answer right. But this fails to take into account the out-of-context expected utility of being AWESOME.

Firing the second guy is fine.

Comment author: TraderJoe 27 April 2012 08:38:39AM *  0 points [-]

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Comment author: TraderJoe 25 April 2012 01:31:10PM *  0 points [-]

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