= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JulianMorrison comments on The First London Rationalist Meetup - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (14)
My main problem was I had so little domain knowledge I couldn't invent any red herrings, let alone realistic ones. The only points where I could throw the result out of whack were those where number guesses were called for - and then I couldn't stray too far from the group too often without giving myself away (and managed to anyhow, Mike says he rumbled me when I estimated Mexicans ate 80% maize).
I got tricked into coming to the defense of what a deceiver ought to do. Heh! Identification and self-justification are powerful.
That made me highly suspicious, but the best evidence was...
Hehe. No-one seemed to be trying to put the estimate in a particular direction so I tried to make the problem a solution - make fun of Red and spot the reactions. I was still only .85 sure as those were the only 2 good clues.
I wasn't actively trying to find out who was Red. Julian said some weird things like 80% maize calories, but everybody said some weird things every now and then.
He hadn't a good reason and stuck to the 80% anyway in a suspiciously out of character way... it's hard to describe. He can take it as a compliment that I expected high standards :-)
I expected everybody to have massive misconceptions about things, so while I believed his 80% maize calories estimate to be completely wrong, he seemed to me like someone who simply doesn't know much about food. For example notice how completely wrong we were about maize yield per square km, surprisingly all in the same direction - that's the kind of mistake that amateurs make often .
Also now that I think of it - our estimate was for weight of corn with cobs. If by any chance one cited by Wikipedia is for corn without cobs, then our first estimate might have been insanely accurate. I don't really have energy to investigate this, but if someone else wants, go ahead.
What can I say - it was just a gut feeling! :-) As I said on Saturday, I already knew Julian.
I don't think it was too overconfident for that gut feeling to count as the lesser of two pieces of evidence raising p(RedJulian) from .5 to .85.