Vaniver comments on Value of Information: Four Examples - Less Wrong

76 Post author: Vaniver 22 November 2011 11:02PM

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Comment author: Romashka 17 September 2016 08:43:03PM 0 points [-]

But what if your friend offers you to stick the gum to any other coin and let you see which way it lands, to get a feel on how the gum "might" affect the result*, and then offer you this deal? How would you calculate Vol then?

  • I ask because I often run into the difference between "physiological" and "ecological" approaches. In the first instance, you might study (for example) "Plant X with/without Fungus Y0 and/or Bacteria Z0" microscope slides, where you carefully inoculate X. In the second, you make slides from X collected in the wild, with who-knows-what growing in it, and have to say if it has Y1 or Z1 or anything at all. I mean, having a previous "physiological" study at hand sure helps, but...are there any quantitative estimates on how much?
Comment author: Vaniver 18 September 2016 10:44:31PM 1 point [-]

This tends to be very context dependent; I don't know enough about biology to estimate. The main caution here is that people tend to forget about regression to the mean (if you have a local measurement X that's only partly related to Y, you should not just port your estimate from X over to Y, but move it closer to what you would have expected from Y beforehand).

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