= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ArisKatsaris comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (558)
The misinterpretation of the survey's meaning of "Europe" as "EU" is itself a failure as significant as wrongly estimating its population... so it's not as if it excuses people who got it wrong and yet neither sought for clarification, nor took the possibility of misinterpretation into account when giving their confidence ratios...
Its also not obvious that people who went with the EU interpretation were incorrect. Language is contextual, if we were to parse the Times, Guardian, BBC, etc over the past year and see how the word "Europe" is actually used, it might be the land mass, or it might be the EU. Certainly one usage will have been more common than the other, but its not obvious to me which one it will have been.
That said, if I had noticed the ambiguity and not auto parsed it as EU, I probably would have expected the typical American to use Europe as land mass and since I think Yvain is American that's what I should have gone with.
On the other other hand, the goal of the question is to gauge numerical calibration, not to gauge language parsing. If someone thought they were answering about the EU, and picked a 90% confidence interval that did in fact include the population of the EU that gives different information about the quantity we are trying to measure then if someone thinks Europe means the continent including Russia and picks a 90% confidence interval that does not include the population of the landmass. Remember this is not a quiz in school to see if someone gets "the right answer" this is a tool that's intended to measure something.
Yvain explicitly said "Wikipedia's Europe page".
Which users could not double-check because they might see the population numbers.
But they should expect the Wikipedia page to refer to the continent.
You might as well ask, "Who is the president of America?" and then follow up with, "Ha ha got you! America is a continent, you meant USA."
I don't think you're making the argument that Yvain deliberately wanted to trick people into giving a wrong answer -- so I really don't see your analogy as illuminating anything.
It was a question. People answered it wrongly whether by making a wrong estimation of the answer, or by making a wrong estimation of the meaning of the question. Both are failures -- and why should we consider the latter failure as any less significant than the former?
EDIT TO ADD: Mind you, reading the excel of the answers it seems I'm among the people who gave an answer in individuals when the question was asking number in millions. So it's not as if I didn't also have a failure in answering -- and yet I do consider that one a less significant failure. Perhaps I'm just being hypocritical in this though.
Confirm. ;) (Nope, I didn't misinterpret it as EU.)
Even if people recognized the ambiguity, it's not obvious that one should go for an intermediate answer rather than putting all one's eggs in one basket by guessing which was meant. If I were taking the survey and saw that ambiguity, I'd probably be confused for a bit, then realize I was taking longer than I'd semi-committed to taking, answer make a snap judgement, and move on.
The continent is basically never called just “America” in modern English (except in the phrases “North America” and “South America”), it's “the Americas”.