Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

elharo

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_baseline_design

take your pick

it requires a good handle of experiment design but biostatisticians do this day in day out. Hopefully risk analysts do this too in defense institutions.

biostatisticians

Just for completion, Anders_H is one of those guys.

3Anders_H10y

The original quote said to rate each intervention by how much it helped or hurt the situation, i.e. its individual-level causal effect. None of those study designs will help you with that: They may be appropriate if you want to estimate the average effect across multiple similar situations, but that is not what you need here. This is a serious question. How do you plan to rate the effectiveness of things like the decision to intervene in Libya, or the decision not to intervene in Syria, under profound uncertainty about what would have happened if the alternative decision had been made?

8

Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

8

8

8

Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

8

8