Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Polling Thread - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 22 January 2014 09:14PM

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Comment author: satt 23 January 2014 02:28:32AM 7 points [-]

In the spirit of crude empiricism, I'll give it a go anyway and see what happens.

Poll: what probabilities do you assign to the following statements?

Men generally have a larger variance than women in most traits.

Because of genetic differences between men & women, men generally have a larger variance than women in most traits.

Men vary more in intelligence than women.

Because of genetic differences between men & women, men vary more in intelligence than women.

Men vary more in intelligence than women, and that contributes non-negligibly to gender imbalance in the sciences.

Because of genetic differences between men & women, men vary more in intelligence than women, and that genetically-driven difference in variance contributes non-negligibly to gender imbalance in the sciences.

Submitting...

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 23 January 2014 09:59:27AM 1 point [-]

Seems that we have learned that P(A&B)<=P(A).

But I wonder whether we have an anchoring problem here. I myself used round numbers and notice that the median is a round number and that the probabilities go down in steps of 0.05 (and the mean follows suit almost linearly).

If anything the compound probabilities should show more or less geometric progression.

Anchoring to one of the values and then just roughly correcting for the difference in phrasing will not work (i.e. don't add any precision).

Do I notice this correctly? Can this be fixed? How?

Comment author: Will_Sawin 24 January 2014 10:45:27AM 0 points [-]

I rated the second question as more likely than the first because I think "most traits" means something different in the two questions.

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