gwern comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong

65 Post author: ThinkOfTheChildren 08 April 2013 09:29PM

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Comment author: gwern 10 April 2013 06:49:13PM 1 point [-]

I think fubar may be right in a certain way: if you observe someone reaching a very high score while having a known poor environment (let's say you've tested them enough so one can ignore issues of <1 reliability causing a regression to the mean on subsequent retests), then you might then estimate that the non-environmental contributions must be unusually high - because something must be causing him to score very high, and it's sure not the environment. So for example, we might infer that his genes or prenatal environment or personality are better than average.

Comment author: private_messaging 10 April 2013 07:52:05PM *  1 point [-]

Yes. As I say, depends to what we are trying to predict and priors. Even with 1 test and significant regression, it's correct to infer higher non-environmental contribution, just not higher combination of environmental and non-environmental.