gwern comments on [Link] FreakoStats and CEV - Less Wrong
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Biases don't have clear 'directions' often. If you are overconfident on a claim P, that's just as accurate as saying you were underconfident on claim ~P. Similarly for anchoring or priming - if you anchor on the random number generator while estimating number of African nations, whether you look "over" or "under" is going to depend on whether the RNG was spitting out 1-50 or 100-200, perhaps.
And what does that mean? If you just want to know 'what do smart people in general believe versus normal people', you don't need large samples if you can get a random selection and your questions are each independent. For example, in my recent Wikipedia experiment I removed only 100 links and 3 were reverted; when I put that into a calculator for a Bernouilli distribution, I get 99% certainty that the true reversion rate is 0-7%. So to simplify considerably, if you sampled 100 smart people and 100 dumb people and they differ by 14%, is that enough certainty for you?
I am not good at statistics, but I guess yes. Especially if those 100 people are really randomly selected, which in the given situation they were.