philh comments on Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously - LessWrong

43 Post author: Yvain 21 January 2014 02:18AM

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Comment author: philh 21 January 2014 02:19:29PM *  1 point [-]

Proto-rationalists thought that, on average, there was a 21% chance of an average cryonically frozen person being revived in the future. Experienced rationalists thought that, on average, there was a 15% chance of same. The difference was marginally significant (p < 0.1).

Both of these numbers are higher than I would have expected, and I'd at least weakly say they at least weakly support the claim "rationalists are gullible, but experienced rationalists are less gullible than proto-rationalists".

Out of curiosity, I took an average in decibels instead of percents, for people with > 1000 karma. Leaving out two people who gave 100% (really?), and four who gave 0%, if I did the calculations right we get -12db = ~5.5%.

(But since 100 and 0 are -/+ epsilon, this might not accurately reflect beliefs.)

(I didn't check time in community, and of course I don't have the full dataset, but the percent average was 14.1 instead of 15, so the results probably don't change much.)

(I might also check whether the 100%ers were trolls, but if we look more closely for trolls among people who profess silly beliefs...)

Comment author: jkaufman 23 January 2014 11:31:11PM 0 points [-]

Does average in decibels give you a geometric mean? I think it does, in which case it's a better average to be taking here.

Comment author: VAuroch 24 January 2014 01:02:07AM *  0 points [-]

Artithmetic mean of the logs is the log of the geometric mean, yes.