Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Those error bars look large enough that I could still be right about myself even without being a total freak.

Really? 11 of the 12 stories got rated higher when spoiled, which is decent evidence against the nil hypothesis (spoilers have zero effect on hedonic ratings) regardless of the error bars' size. Under the nil hypothesis, each story has a 50/50 chance of being rated higher when spoiled, giving a probability of (¹²C₁₁ × 0.5¹¹ × 0.5¹) + (¹²C₁₂ × 0.5¹² × 0.5⁰) = 0.0032 that ≥11 stories get a higher rating when spoiled. So the nil hypothesis gets rejected with a p-value of 0.0063 (the probability's doubled to make the test two-tailed), and presumably the result... (read more)