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Will_Newsome comments on Which cognitive biases should we trust in? - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: Andy_McKenzie 01 June 2012 06:37AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 01 June 2012 11:47:35PM 2 points [-]

Thanks. Can you recommend of a short primer of his (like a summary article)?

Check out fastandfrugal.com. For critiques of Kahneman, I don't think there's a single summary, just Google Scholar Gigerenzer Kahneman.

If data sharing, replication, and transparency of methods all continue to increase, I do expect most of psychology's current problems will be vastly mitigated.

Is blind application of data-mining packages increasing or staying constant at this point? If increasing, do the good trends outweigh it?

Comment author: wedrifid 02 June 2012 12:39:41AM 0 points [-]

Is blind application of data-mining packages increasing or staying constant at this point? If increasing, do the good trends outweigh it?

What is it about the blind application of data-mining packages that is not-good? (If it works for achieving the goals of the user more effectively than whatever they were doing before then good for them!)

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 June 2012 12:43:55AM *  1 point [-]

I can't tell if you're making a joke or arguing that hand-applied statistical practices of amateurs are actually worse for truth-seekers than automated data-mining.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 June 2012 12:54:23AM 0 points [-]

I can't tell if you're making a joke or arguing

Was going for "ask a question in the hope of getting a literal answer".

I don't have much information about when data mining packages are used, how effective they are for those uses or what folks would have done if they had not used them.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 June 2012 12:55:14AM 1 point [-]

I see. I don't have any good resources for you, sadly. I'd ask gwern.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 June 2012 01:03:24AM 0 points [-]

I see. I don't have any good resources for you, sadly.

I was essentially asking for your pure opinion/best guess. ie. An unpacking of what I infer were opinions/premises implied by "[not] good". Nevermind. I'll take it to be approximately "blind application of data-mining packages is worse than useless and gives worse outcomes than whatever they would or wouldn't have done if they didn't have the package".

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 June 2012 01:06:47AM 1 point [-]

Sorry, I just don't have a strong opinion. It's hard for me to consider the counterfactual, because there's lots of selection effects on what studies I see both from the present time and the time before software data-miners were popular.

Comment author: Andy_McKenzie 02 June 2012 12:12:27AM 0 points [-]

Is blind application of data-mining packages increasing or staying constant at this point? If increasing, do the good trends outweigh it?

Good question and really hard to tell. Certainly it happens now! But I bet it happened in the past too. Whether data-sharing standards in publications has been rising is something that is observable (i.e., people saying what they did to the data), and I'd be willing to bet on it empirically getting better.

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