Vaniver comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: gwern 17 April 2013 02:10:50AM 6 points [-]

I'm interested in associating the details of print production with an unnamed aesthetic object, which we'll presently call the Big Book, and which is the source of all of our evidence.

It's the Bible, isn't it.

Print Shop 1 has Tools (1), and those Tools (1) leave unintended Marks in the Big Book. Likewise with Print Shop 2 and their Tools (2). Unfortunately, people in the present don't know which Print Shop had which Tools. Even worse, multiple sets of Tools can leave similar Marks.

How can you possibly get off the ground if you have no information about any of the Print Shops, much less how many there are? GIGO.

I'm far from an expert in Bayesian methods, but it seems already that there's something missing here.

Have you considered googling for previous work? 'Bayesian inference in phylogeny' and 'Bayesian stylometry' both seem like reasonable starting points.

Comment author: Vaniver 17 April 2013 02:26:50PM 2 points [-]

How can you possibly get off the ground if you have no information about any of the Print Shops, much less how many there are? GIGO.

Not quite. You can get quite a bit of insight out of unsupervised clustering.

Comment author: gwern 17 April 2013 03:43:00PM 1 point [-]

'No free lunches', right? If you're getting anything out of your unsupervised methods, that just means they're making some sort of assumptions and proceeding based on those.

Comment author: Vaniver 17 April 2013 04:20:38PM 4 points [-]

Right, but this isn't a free lunch so much as "you can see a lot by looking."

Comment author: HumanitiesResearcher 18 April 2013 05:29:38AM 4 points [-]

Sorry to interrupt a perfectly lovely conversation. I just have a few things to add:

  • I may have overstated the case in my first post. We have some information about print shops. Specifically, we can assign very small books to print shops with a high degree of confidence. (The catch is that small books don't tend to survive very well. The remaining population is rare and intermittent in terms of production date.)

  • There are some hypotheses that could be treated as priors, but they're very rarely quantified (projects like this are rare in today's humanities).

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