Science is simple enough that you can sic a bunch of people on a problem with a crib sheet and an "I can do science, me" attitude, and get a good enough answer early. The mental toolkit for applying Bayes is harder to give to people. I am right at the beggining approaching from a mentally lazy, slight psychological, and engineering background, when I first saw the word Bayes was in a certain Harry Potter fanfic a week or so ago. I failed the insightful tests in the early sequences, and caught myself noticing I was confused and not doing anything about it, and failed all over again in the next set of insightful tests. I have a way to go.
The time it takes for me to get a "I can do Bayes, me" attitude, even with a crib sheet, could have been spent solving a bunch of other problems.
If the choice is between science and Bayes, which at my low level of training I suspect is a false choice, then at the moment I would go science because I am better at it than Bayes. Like I type Qwerty not Dvorak, because I can type faster Qwerty even though Dvorak is (allegedly) better.
Given that each person at the moment has finite problem solving time, an argument could be made for applying Science to problems as it is easier to teach. That being said "I notice that I am confused" would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had heard of it earlier.
Sure.
More generally, if I don't want to optimize X, but merely want to satisfy some threshold T for X, then I don't really care what the optimal way of doing X is in general, I care what way of doing X gets me across T most cheaply. If getting across T using process P1 costs effort E1 from where I am now, and P2 costs E2, and E2 > E1, and I don't care about anything else, I should choose E1.
The catch is, like a lot of humans, I also have a tendency to overestimate both the effectiveness of whatever I'm used to doing and the costs of changing to somethi...
Today's post, The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? was originally published on 13 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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