Thanks, nice work.
The comment: 13 points Hey 02 November 2011 09:01:09AM is maybe something you want to remove.
At least you're not alone.
West and Brown has done some work on this which seemed pretty solid to me when I read it a few months ago. The basic idea is that biological systems are designed in a fractal way which messes up the dimensional analysis.
From the abstract of http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/208/9/1575:
...We have proposed a set of principles based on the observation that almost all life is sustained by hierarchical branching networks, which we assume have invariant terminal units, are space-filling and are optimised by the process of natural selection. We show
To convey an idea that is obvious in retrospect, an idea you can be confident in immediately
Solutions to hard puzzles are good examples of these. NP-problems, where finding a solution is (believed to be) exponentially harder than checking the correctness of it, is the extreme case.
It's called an improper prior. There's been some argument about their use but they seldom lead to problems. The posteriors usually has much better behavior at infinity and when they don't, that's the theory telling us that the information doesn't determine the solution to the problem.
The observation that an improper prior cannot be obtain as a posterior distribution is kind of trivial. It is meant to represent a total lack of information w.r.t. some parameter. As soon you have made an observation you have more information than that.
[Sorry for not answering earlier, I didn't find the inbox until recently.]
I perhaps was a bit unclear, but when I say "ideal bayesian" I mean a mathematical construct that does full bayesian updating i.e. incorporates all prior knowledge into its calculations. This is of course impossible for anyone not extremely ignorant of the world, which is why I called it a minor point.
An ideal bayesian calculation would include massive deductive work on e.g. the psychology of voting, knowledge of the functioning of this community in particular etc.
My comme...
Reading the Wikipedia article on hyperbolic discounting it seems like there is some evidence for a quasi-hyperbolic discounting. Looking at the formula, the interpretation is exponential discounting for all future times considered but with a special treatment of the present.
How to explain this? It is not unlikely that the brain uses one system for thinking about now and another about the future. Considering the usual workings of evolution, the latter is most likely a much later feature than the former. Considering this, one could perhaps even argue that it...
This is a project that I think really would profit from recruitment of a few psychologists with experience on creating personality test, IQ test or similarly. It sounds a bit like we're trying to create a new subfield here. Not that I want to sound discouraging, I think it is very important to get the ball rolling and even small, preliminary results could prove to be very useful, but there is probably enough material here to base quite a few academic careers on.
I'll have to agree with Kaj that a short survey is better for most purposes, but throwing out a long list of ideas first to later hone down to a more efficient one is a good idea.
I think you may very well be correct in your interpretation of the original authors intention. However, I think Yvain's is more spot on for the majority of the upvotes the comment got.
Is it harder for you to say "Evidence indicates that God exists" than for you to say "I believe God exists"? Just curious, it's a bit of a pet theory of mine. If you don't want to expend energy just to provide another data point for me, no hard feelings.
If you would be really kind, you could try to indicate how comfortable you are with different qualifiers jimrandomh gave.
Ah, but the point is that "believe" is the weasliest of words. I know a few, and would guess there are quite a lot more, intelligent people who readily states "I believe that there is a God" but who would be very hesitant if you asked them to use "Evidence indicates that".
I would say that what you call weasel words occupy a scale and that its not just as easy to use them all in any given context, at least not for reasonably intelligent people.
The title of the post is "Does blind review slow down science?", not "Does blind review stop science?". The prestigious researchers may have the time, but there are plenty of members of humanity that don't. Science is slow enough as it is. We would be well advised to consider any factors that may speed up progress.
The endpoints 1,2 and 4 are more or less equivalent; they are worth repeating though. There isn't really any worth in a score of votes on the true quality, at least not for bayesians. A score of votes on individual judgments would contain all useful information.
A thought experiment: You could use a double voting system: you make one vote on your beliefs before updating on the consensus and another vote in a separate count on your updated belief. The point would be to update on the consensus of the first vote count and use the second vote count for all ot...
Took the survey.