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 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).