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True, but if marketing is your aim you are probably better off familiarizing yourself with standard best practices than with cutting-edge research.
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[link] Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets
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[link] Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets
Wouldn't a lot of either standard best practices or cutting edge research fall under what is considered "dark arts" here? So this really becomes "you can use Dark Arts for good purposes". Whether you should do so seems at least questionable, although I can see some arguments for it (such as when you need to use it to get rid of the effect of biases or to oppose someone else's dark arts).
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Bayesianism for humans: prosaic priors
Ooh, I get to comment.
A particular dull explanation is more likely than a particular exciting one. But it is possible that dull explanations, in general, are not more likely than exciting ones, in general, because there might be more of the exciting explanations even though each individual one is less likely.
(This is not typical--if you have cold symptoms, you probably have a cold and not an exotic disease--but it's possible.)
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Landsburg writes:
But the set of all possible minds is so vast that the fact that numbers feel real to us feels to my mind as extremely weak evidence that numbers are real.
I think (it's not my post) that it's supposed to be evidence that numbers are real because the set of all possible minds is vast. Because there are so many possible minds, it's unlikely that a mind chosen randomly from that set would have similar intuitions about numbers to mine. It's even more unlikely that a third mind would also have those intuitions. Yet, for some reason, this vastly unlikely thing happens anyway. This implies that there is some reason which is responsible for all the minds feeling the same way. One such reason would be "the intuition is correct, and the minds have correctly figured it out".
(Other possible reasons could be "all the minds are biased in the same way" or some other reason unrelated to truth of the idea, but nobody's saying it's proof, it's just evidence.)