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Will_Sawin comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion

65 Post author: ThinkOfTheChildren 08 April 2013 09:29PM

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Comment author: Will_Sawin 10 April 2013 10:24:59PM 1 point [-]

One might say that the sanity waterline one has to cross to rationally handle test-score-based Bayesian predictions in a by-and-large rational way is much lower than the sanity waterline one has to cross to rationally handle relative-finger-length-based predictions, which itself is lower than the waterline for skin-color-based predictions.

Comment author: private_messaging 11 April 2013 05:09:25AM *  5 points [-]

What sanity? Everyone is pushing for measures that would be advantageous for themselves, opposing disadvantageous measures, and there's nothing particularly insane about that, it's just instinctive selfishness. The white 'nerds' for instance could be OK with adjustment for race, but very much not OK with adjustment for various looking odd metrics (which lump them together with the autistic). It's only Bayesian when it's someone else; when it's you losing points, that's you being lumped together with other people (on basis of some random trait that happens to be widely measured), which is of course bad and irrational and a bias (complete with examples of how it is inexact). Nothing insane about that either, it's just selfishness.

Meanwhile, I'd dare to guess you can get considerably larger boost in accuracy from adding a couple more questions to a test, or using data from some other standardized test.