= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - 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 (395)
This is one of the loonier[1] ideas to be found on Overcoming Bias (and that's quite saying something). Exercise for the reader: test this idea that sharing opinions screens off the usefulness of sharing evidence with the following real-world scenario. I have participated in this scenario several times and know what the correct answer is.
You are on the programme committee of a forthcoming conference, which is meeting to decide which of the submitted papers to accept. Each paper has been refereed by several people, each of whom has given a summary opinion (definite accept, weak accept, weak reject, or definite reject) and supporting evidence for the opinion.
To transact business most efficiently, some papers are judged solely on the summary opinions. Every paper rated a definite accept by every referee for that paper is accepted without further discussion, because if three independent experts all think it's excellent, it probably is, and further discussion is unlikely to change that decision. Similarly, every paper firmly rejected by every referee is rejected. For papers that get a uniformly mediocre rating, the committee have to make some judgement about where to draw the line between filling out the programme and maintaining a high standard.
That leaves a fourth class: papers where the referees disagree sharply. Here is a paper where three referees say definitely accept, one says definitely reject. On another paper, it's the reverse. Another, two each way.
How should the committee decide on these papers? By combining the opinions only, or by reading the supporting evidence?
ETA: [1] By which I mean not "so crazy it must be wrong" but "so wrong it's crazy".
I think the most straightforward way is to do a second round. Let every referee read the opinions of the other referees and see whether they converge onto a shared judgement.
If you want a more formal name the Delphi method
What actually happens is that the reasons for the summary judgements are examined.
Three for, one against. Is the dissenter the only one who has not understood the paper, or the only one who knows that although the work is good, almost the same paper has just been accepted to another conference? The set of summary judgements is the same but the right final judgement is different. Therefore there is no way to get the latter from the former.
Aumann agreement requires common knowledge of each others' priors. When does this ever obtain? I believe Robin Hanson's argument about pre-priors just stands the turtle on top of another turtle.
People don't coincide in their priors, don't have access to the same evidence and aren't running off the same epistemology, and can't settle epistemologiical debates non-circularly......
Threr's a lot wrong with Aumannn, or at least the way some people use it.
Really? My understanding was that
(From Rowe & Wright's "Expert opinions in forecasting: the role of the Delphi technique", in the usual Armstrong anthology.) From the sound of it, the feedback is often purely statistical in nature, and if it wasn't commonly such restricted feedback, it's hard to see why Rowe & Wright would criticize Delphi studies for this:
I was referring to what actually happens in a programme committee meeting, not the Delphi method.
Fine. Then consider it an example of 'loony' behavior in the real world: Delphi pools, as a matter of fact, for many decades, have operated by exchanging probabilities and updating repeatedly, and in a number of cases performed well (justifying their continued usage). You don't like Delphi pools? That's cool too, I'll just switch my example to prediction markets.
It would be interesting to conduct an experiment to compare the two methods for this problem. However, it is not clear how to obtain a ground truth with which to judge the correctness of the results. BTW, my further elaboration, with the example of one referee knowing that the paper under discussion was already published, was also non-fictional. It is not clear to me how any decision method that does not allow for sharing of evidence can yield the right answer for this example.
What have Delphi methods been found to perform well relative to, and for what sorts of problems?
That assumes we don't have any criteria on which to judge good versus bad scientific papers.
You could train your model to predict the amount of citations that a paper will get. You can also look at variables such as reproduced papers or withdrawn papers.
Define a utility function that collapses such variables into a single one. Run a real world experiment in a journal and do 50% of the paper submissions with one mechanism and 50% with the other. Let a few years go by and then you evaluate the techniques based on your utility function.
Something along those lines might be done, but an interventional experiment (creating journals just to test a hypothesis about refereeing) would be impractical. That leaves observational data-collecting, where one might compare the differing practices of existing journals. But the confounding problems would be substantial.
Or, more promisingly, you could do an experiment with papers that are already published and have a citation record, and have experimental groups of referees assess them, and test different methods of resolving disagreements. That might actually be worth doing, although it has the flaw that it would only be assessing accepted papers and not the full range of submissions.
Then no reason why you can't test different procedures in an existing journal.