Cyan comments on Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator. - Less Wrong

62 Post author: AdeleneDawner 22 May 2011 09:37AM

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Comment author: Cyan 25 May 2011 12:58:14PM 0 points [-]

The reason why I suggest looking at the width of the Wilson confidence interval instead of looking directly at the number of votes is because the width of the confidence interval is a direct measure of the information we have about a horoscope. It's hard to reason about what is likely to happen when addressing amount of votes; what we really care about is the precision with which horoscope quality is known. In particular, learning the quality of extreme horoscopes (either good or bad) takes fewer votes than learning about 50 percenters, a fact which will be reflected in the width of the confidence interval.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 25 May 2011 10:28:44PM 1 point [-]

That does make sense. It doesn't help that each horoscope has 5 intervals, though. Maybe look at the narrowest one for each horoscope?

Comment author: Cyan 26 May 2011 12:56:24AM 0 points [-]

That seems reasonable.