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Clicking the first image for full size isn't working, seems to be a link problem there.
Post here if you live in Sweden.
In response to
Buy Insurance -- Bet Against Yourself
I've heard about people doing this for sports events they care about - e.g. betting against their national team qualifying for the soccer World Cup.
In response to
Something's Wrong
While I don't disagree that it can be valuable to say that there's something wrong with a theory, it should be noted that at least for factual matters, if you can't provide an alternative explanation then your criticism isn't actually that strong. The probability of a hypothesis being the true explanation for an observation is the fraction its probability makes up of the total probability of that observation (summing over all competing hypothesis, weighed by their respective likelihoods). If you can't move in with another hypothesis to steal some probability clay from the first hypothesis (by providing likelihood values that better predict the observations), that first hypothesis is not going to take a hit.
In response to
Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2
Has anyone read, and could comment on, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach by philosophers Howson and Urbach? To me it appears to be the major work on Bayes from within mainstream philosophy of science, but reviews are mixed and I can't really get a feel for its quality and whether it's worth reading.
In response to
Open Thread: June 2010
Cleaning out my computer I found some old LW-related stuff I made for graphic editing practice. Now that we have a store and all, maybe someone here will find it useful:
In response to
The Psychological Diversity of Mankind
"More specifically, they suggest that this could have been caused by interbreeding between "modern" humans and Neanderthals."
Probably bunk, IMO. An entertaining story, but lacking supporting evidence.
Where on Earth have you been for the last couple of days? : ] Hiding in a Croatian cave?
That being said, we currently have no reason to believe that this interbreeding had any phenotypic effects on the human lineage.
In response to
The Psychological Diversity of Mankind
If we're looking to find out if humans vary significantly in their psychological phenotypes, why not compare these phenotypes directly rather than appealing to highly shaky evolutionary speculations about genotypes?
(Sure, environmental variation also contributes to phenotypic variation, but we have no reason to believe that the current level of human psychological variation is masked by environmental factors - especially since right now environmental variation is probably at its peak in human history)
In response to
Open Thread: April 2010
Does anyone know a popular science book about, how should I put it, statistical patterns and distributions in the universe. Like, what kind of things follow normal distributions and why, why do power laws emerge everywhere, why scale-free networks all over the place, etc. etc.
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Actually, they will not sequence your genome - they will genotype you. It's actually quite a difference and I would recommend changing the title of this post. So what they do is use a so called "SNP chip" to test your genotype at a large number (hundreds of thousands) of positions known to be polymorphic in the human population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNP_genotyping). This is the same technology currently used by personal genomics companies such as 23andMe, and it's not particularly expensive.
Sequencing a genome is done by totally different technologies, and can potentially determine your entire genome sequence (whereas in the genotyping case you are restricted to the particular loci that were included on the chip). It it also still considerably more expensive.