RobinZ comments on Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010 - Less Wrong

24 Post author: DanielVarga 18 December 2010 09:36PM

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Comment author: RobinZ 22 December 2010 02:22:24PM 0 points [-]

I don't quite understand the methodology - how do you determine the karma distribution for each poster? And how is the list sorted?

Comment author: DanielVarga 22 December 2010 09:00:20PM 1 point [-]

I am afraid I don't understand either of your questions. I work with the karma distribution only in the quotes domain. It doesn't have to be determined, I collected all the data myself. The list is sorted by p-value.

We have the total list of quotes, with scores and posters. We know that Kutta scored 90 points from 7 quotes. Our null hypothesis is that he randomly selected 7 quotes from the total set of 1138 quotes. The p-value is the probability that he could achieve at least 90 points by this process. If his actual method yields better scores then random drawing, then the p-value will be low.

I have very low opinion of classical frequentist statistics, but it seemed to be very suitable for this task. I am sure that there is already a name for this method I reinvented. Of course, the null hypothesis is ridiculous, so we shouldn't assign much meaning to these numbers. It is just one of the many ways we can solve this ranking task.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 December 2010 09:16:16PM 1 point [-]

Okay, that makes sense - the number is the probability that they could have picked up as many points as they did by picking randomly from the set of all quotes. I understand now.