army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: arundelo 05 February 2013 10:20PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2013 08:10:54PM *  3 points [-]

Yeah, it doesn't seem likely given that study that works are liked in average less when spoiled; but what I meant is that probably there are certain individuals who like works less when spoiled. (Imagine Alice said something to the effect that she prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream, and Bob said that it's not actually the case that vanilla tastes worse than chocolate, citing a study in which for 11 out of 12 ice cream brands their vanilla ice cream is liked more in average than their chocolate ice cream -- though in most cases the difference between the averages is not much bigger than each standard deviation; even if the study was conducted among a demographic that does include Alice, that still wouldn't necessarily mean Alice is mistaken, lying, or particularly unusual, would it?)

Comment author: satt 04 February 2013 09:29:19PM *  1 point [-]

Just so. These are the sort of "inter-individual variation in hedonic spoiler effects" I had in mind earlier.

Edit: to elaborate a bit, it was the "error bars look large enough" bit of your earlier comment that triggered my sceptical "Really?" reaction. Apart from that bit I agree(d) with you!

Edit 2: aha, I probably did misunderstand you earlier. I originally interpreted your error bars comment as a comment on the statistical significance of the pairwise differences in bar length, but I guess you were actually ballparking the population standard deviation of spoiler effect from the sample size and the standard errors of the means.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 February 2013 04:56:34AM *  1 point [-]

These are the sort of "inter-individual variation in hedonic spoiler effects" I had in mind earlier.

Huh. For some reason I had read that as "intra-individual". Whatever happened to the "assume people are saying something reasonable" module in my brain?

 I guess you were actually ballparking the population standard deviation of spoiler effect from the sample size and the standard errors of the means.

Yep.