gwern comments on Less Wrong Polls in Comments - Less Wrong

79 Post author: jimrandomh 19 September 2012 04:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (302)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: royf 20 September 2012 05:03:05PM *  5 points [-]

To anyone thinking this is not random, with 42 votes in:

  • The p-value is 0.895 (this is the probability of seeing at least this much non-randomness, assuming a uniform distribution)

  • The entropy is 2.302bits instead of log(5) = 2.322bits, for 0.02bits KL-distance (this is the number of bits you lose for encoding one of these votes as if it was random)

If you think you see a pattern here, you should either see a doctor or a statistician.

Comment author: gwern 26 September 2012 08:00:42PM *  1 point [-]

Well, it's worth noting people seem to be trainable to choose randomly: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/1986-neuringer.pdf

Apropos of the PRNG discussion in http://blog.yunwilliamyu.net/2011/08/14/mindhack-mental-math-pseudo-random-number-generators/ for which I wrote some flashcards: http://pastebin.com/CKif0fEf