maia comments on Consider Representative Data Sets - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 06 May 2009 01:49AM

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Comment author: maia 12 April 2012 06:32:24PM *  2 points [-]

You don't provide any examples and your text is too dense and abstract. Try using smaller words and shorter sentences. Also, you put too much emphasis on your numbering scheme: You bold "The first mistake" and then you de-emphasize the part where you actually say what that mistake is, and the rest of the paragraph is a wall of text.

It's also, frankly, not very helpful.

The irrelevant data may find its way in your thoughts covertly, through priming effects you don't even notice... Don't think about fictional evidence, don't think about the facts that look superficially relevant to the question, but actually aren't

You can't avoid priming effects once you've been primed. "Don't think about it" just won't work.

It seems like the main point of your post is to present biases in a new way: modeling them all as some form of "using the wrong data." I'm skeptical that this is a helpful model, but honestly, I would probably be a lot less skeptical if your post focused on that main point more clearly.