I'm just curious if anyone has weighed the evidence from the Casey Anthony murder using a Bayesian filter. Someone made a very useful post like this for the Amanda Knox case, but I think for this case it would be even more useful. Given the apparent hysteria in traditional media, social networks, etc. it would be great to have a nice dose of rationality about the case.
My gut feeling is that most people have not bothered to weight the evidence, but look at the surface layers of the case and judge based on questionable heuristics. It also seems to me that the members of the jury had a lot more time and reason to carefully weigh the evidence (even if they aren't Bayesians) than your average, angry twitter user. Additionally, coming out on one side or another gives a great opportunity to signal (think of the children vs. strict constitutionalism).
Any thoughts?
There's probably an absurdity bias going on in the rejection of cryonics (the dead just don't come back, and frozen people look dead). It also violates tradition (burying and incineration). And in our culture, the mere image of frozen bodies in a fridge has more disgusting connotations than happy ones.
So that's my speculation about why someone who never actually thought about cryonics might reject it. Maybe if we tell those people about these reasons, they could change their mind?
Agree with the absurdity bias. For most (even smart) people their exposure to cryonics is things like Woody Allen's Sleeper and Futurama. I almost can't blame them for only seeing the absurd... I'm still trying to come around to it myself.
Then you may be interested in the research of Michael I. Jordan. (The computational biology link will probably be the most useful to you, but as you can see from the diversity of applications, he's quite the generalist.)
Out of professional curiosity, what is the focus of your research? (I'm a postdoc statistician at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology.)
Not completely defined at the moment since I'm a 1st year PhD student at NYU, and currently doing rotations. It'll be something like comparative genomics/regulatory networks to study evolution of bacteria or perhaps communities of bacteria.
You'll get more response from the NY group (we don't all check LW and discussion board regularly) by making a post to the google group/listserve:
http://groups.google.com/group/overcomingbiasnyc/topics?start=
Thanks... this should come in handy in my computational research in systems biology
A broken clock is right twice per day. If value theory is incidentally correct, it doesn't make folk theories valuable on the margins - unless of course, if people who hold folk theories do consistently better than rationalists, but then I'd question the rationalist label.
Currently trendy is the Bayesian argument, which frequently starts with asserting that the only acceptable proper and right-thinking prior probability of God is 0.5 AAAAAARGH
(The problem here being the assumption that we start knowing nothing at all rather than that we know really quite a lot - that being the bit in the argument where a negligible probability is turned into a non-negligible one.)
(Sorry, I just had lunch with some relatively sensible theists and I'm still going AAAAAARGH)
Is that because if you treat probabilities of (God or not God) as maximum entropy without prior information you'd get 50/50?
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On the plus side, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the fourth response to Rationality, even signed out.
And Yudkowski.net is result #6