Greg D
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Greg D has not written any posts yet.
Greg D has not written any posts yet.
Right, exactly. But this isn’t only about satellite tracking. A lot of the time you don’t have the luxury of comparing the high-precision estimate to the low-precision estimate. You’re only talking to the second guy, and it’s important not to take his apparent confidence at face value. Maybe this is obvious to you, but a lot of the content on this site is about explicating common errors of logic and statistics that people might fall for. I think it’s valuable.
In the satellite tracking example, the thing to do is exactly as you say: whatever the error bars on your measurements, treat that as the effective size of the satellite. If you can... (read more)
The "paradox" here is that when one person says there's a 70% chance that the satellites are safe, and another says there's a 99.9% chance that they're safe, it sounds like the second person must be much more certain about what's going on up there. But in this case, the opposite is true.
When someone says "there's a 99.9% chance that the satellites won't collide," we naturally imagine that this statement is being generated by a process that looks like "I performed a high-precision measurement of the closest approach distance, my central estimate is that there won't be a collision, and the case where there is a collision is off in the wings... (read more)
I’m not a data scientist, but I love these. I’ve got a four-hour flight ahead of me and a copy of Microsoft Excel; maybe now is the right time to give one a try!
!It seems like the combination of materials determines the cost of the structure.
!Architects who apprenticed with Johnson or Stamatin always produce impossible buildings; architects who apprenticed with Geisel, Penrose, or Escher NEVER do. Self-taught architects sometimes produce impossible buildings, and sometimes they do not.
!This lets us select 5 designs from our proposals which will certainly produce impossible buildings. To do better, we need to understand how to tell when a proposal by a self-taught architect is likely to produce
I was an inveterate thirder until I read a series of articles on repeated betting, which pointed out that in many cases, maximizing expected utility leads to a “heavy tailed” situation in which a few realizations of you have enormous utility, but most realizations of you have gone bankrupt. The mean utility across all realizations is large, but that’s useless in the vast majority of cases because there’s no way to transfer utility from one realization to another. This got me thinking about SB again, and the extent to which Beauties can or can not share or transfer utility between them. I eventually convinced myself of the halfer position.
Here’s the line of... (read more)
You don’t need to posit systematic self-delusion to explain any of these things - whether failing to eradicate malaria, or failing to recommend 100% funding of the top charities. You cannot arrive at a price to eradicate malaria by taking the price to prevent one case of malaria on margin and multiplying by the number of malaria cases. The same is true of poverty, homelessness, hunger, et cetera. There are a lot of popular, well-documented ways of giving to any of these causes and do approximately no good at all. Just identifying places where money can actually improve things a little bit on margin is an enormous improvement over the pre-EA state... (read more)