This post confused me enormously. I thought I must be missing something, but reading over the comments, this seems to be true for virtually all readers.
What exactly do you mean by "bead jar guess"? "Surprise"? "Actual probability"? Are you making a new point or explaining something existing? Are you purposely being obscure "to make us think"?
I propose replacing this entire post with the following text:
Hey everybody! Read E.T. Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic Of Science!
Belated apologies for cranky tone on this comment.
I strongly agree. As an anecdotal data point, I understood the suggested alternative but not the original wording. And it is a powerful point to miss because I haven't heard of Kahnemann and Tversky.
Also, if mentioning specific researchers were central to the point, I would recommend linking to a resource about them, or better yet, create entries for them on the Less Wrong Wiki and link to those.
Done, thanks for the feedback!
I made the mistake I'm talking about---assuming certain things were well-known.
Take a second to go upvote You Are A Brain if you haven't already...
This is extremely off-topic, but please do not tell me what to upvote. I actually downvoted that post because the slideshow was completely useless to me and I thought its quality was poor. This isn't to slam Liron; his post just didn't do it for me.
But just because you really, really liked it doesn't mean you get to tell me what to like.
I actually think Liron's slideshow needs a lot of work, but it seems very much like the kind of thing LWers should be trying to do out in the world.
the slideshow was completely useless to me
Yes, of course it was. It was created for teenagers who are utterly unfamiliar with this way of thinking.
its quality was poor
OK. Can you improve it or do better?
Seconded! Those names didn't ring a bell for me either, though I'm familiar with the results from Prespect Theory (I probably read about them on OB), and that's probably what talisman was refering to.
Definitely worth reading up. K & T are the intellectual fathers of the entire modern heuristics and biases program. There was some earlier work (e.g. Allais) but from what I hazily recall that work was fairly muddled conceptually.
For instance, reasoning by expected utility, which you probably consider too basic to mention
Actually, I consider it too complicated for my first book! That's going to focus on getting across even more basic concepts like 'the point of reasoning about your beliefs is to function as a mapping engine that produces correlations between a map and the territory' and 'strong evidence is the sort of evidence we couldn't possibly find if the hypothesis were false'.
Funny. I feel like on OB and LW utility theory is generally taken as the air we breathe.
Take a second to go upvote You Are A Brain if you haven't already...
Back? OK.
Liron's post reminded me of something that I meant to say a while ago. In the course of giving literally hundreds of job interviews to extremely high-powered technical undergraduates over the last five years, one thing has become painfully clear to me: even very smart and accomplished and mathy people know nothing about rationality.
For instance, reasoning by expected utility, which you probably consider too basic to mention, is something they absolutely fall flat on. Ask them why they choose as they do in simple gambles involving risk, and they stutter and mutter and fail. Even the Econ majors. Even--perhaps especially--the Putnam winners.
Of those who have learned about heuristics and biases, a nontrivial minority have gotten confused to the point that they offer Kahneman and Tversky's research as justifying their exhibition of a bias!
So foundational explanatory work like Liron's is really pivotal. As I've touched on before, I think there's a huge amount to be done in organizing this material and making it approachable for people that don't have the basics. Who's going to write the Intuitive Explanation of Utility Theory?
Meanwhile, I need to brush up on my Python and find a way to upvote Liron more than once. If only...
Update: Tweaked language per suggestion, added Kahneman and Tversky link.
While I agree in this case, your criticism as stated is so vague that it could be made of any idea
Yet is wasn't made of any idea, and if you agree in this case, you deem it appropriate for this case, in which it was made. It is a fairly general principle: don't try to juggle a thousand angry cats at once, human mind is not that strong.
Vladimir - "concentrated confusion", "a thousand angry cats": that's exactly the kind of spice that your earlier post needed! :-)
Also fewer function words...
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I do not think your claim is what you think it is.
I think your claim is that some people mistake the model for the reality, the map for the territory. Of course models are simpler than reality! That's why they're called "models."
Physics seems to have gotten wiser about this. The Newtonians, and later the Copenhagenites, did fall quite hard for this trap (though the Newtonians can be forgiven to some degree!). More recently, however, the undisputed champion physical model, whose predictions hold to 987 digits of accuracy (not really), has the humble name "The Standard Model," and it's clear that no one thinks it's the ultimate true nature of reality.
Can you give specific examples of people making big mistakes from map/territory confusion? The closest thing I can think of offhand is the Stern Report, which tries to make economic calculations a century from now based on our current best climate+social+political+economic models.