All of jake987722's Comments + Replies

These are good points. Do you think that if the researchers did find the sort of discretization that they are hypothesizing, that this would represent at least some weak evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis, or do you think it's completely uninformative with respect to the simulation hypothesis?

Damn. I quickly checked to see if this link had been posted, but I guess I didn't look far back enough--I assumed that if it had been, it would have been very recently, but apparently it was actually posted 10 days ago... my bad.

Have to disagree with you on, well, several points here.

Heuristics in Heuristics and Biases are only descriptive. [...] Heuristics in Heuristics and biases are defined as having negative side effects.

If your claim is that heuristics are defined by H&B theorists as being explicitly not prescriptive, in the sense of never being "good" or "useful," this is simply not the case. For instance, in the opening paragraph of their seminal 1974 Science article, Kahneman & Tversky clearly state that "...people rely on a limited nu... (read more)

What I'm saying is that is how many people tend to wrongly interpret such statistics to define their own null hypothesis in the way I outlined in the post.

But that's not right. The problem that your burden of proof example describes is a problem of priors. The theist and the atheist are starting with priors that favor different hypotheses. But priors (notoriously!) don't enter into the NHST calculus. Given two statistical models, one of which is a nested subset of the other (this is required in order to directly compare them), there is not a choice of w... (read more)

As an aspiring scientist, I hold the Truth above all.

That will change!

More seriously though...

As one can see, the biggest problem is determining burden of proof. Statistically speaking, this is much like the problem of defining the null hypothesis.

Well, not really. The null and alternative hypotheses in frequentist statistics are defined in terms of their model complexity, not our prior beliefs (that would be Bayesian!). Specifically, the null hypothesis represents the model with fewer free parameters.

You might still face some sort of statistical d... (read more)

It doesn't sound unreasonable to me given the severity of your symptoms. But I'm not a sleep doctor.

Consider also that there are other ways to procure drugs like this, i.e., shady online vendors from overseas. Just make sure you do your research on the vendors first. There are people who have ordered various drugs from these vendors, chemically verified that the drugs were in fact what they were advertised to be, and then posted their results in various places online for the benefit of others. Bottom line: some companies are more trustworthy than others--do your homework. And obviously you should exercise due caution when taking a new drug without a doctor's consent.

How about Modafinil or a similar drug? It is prescribed for narcolepsy. More generally, can I safely assume that "everything" includes having talked to your doctor about how serious these symptoms are?

I think you're taking the fundamentally wrong approach. Rather than trying to simply predict when you'll be sleepy in the near-term, you should try to actively get your sleeping patterns under control.

Robin Hanson's posts from the AI Foom debate are not included in the list of all articles. Covering only Yudkowsky's side of the debate would be a little strange for readers I think. Should we feature Hanson's posts (and others who participated in the debate) during that time as well?

Yes, that's exactly right.

And although I'm having a hard time finding a news article to verify this, someone informed me that the official breast cancer screening recommendations in the US (or was it a particular state, perhaps California?) were recently modified such that it is now not recommended that women younger than 40 (50?) receive regular screening. The young woman who informed me of this change in policy was quite upset about it. It didn't make any sense to her. I tried to explain to her how it actually made good sense when you think about it in ... (read more)

I agree with previous comments about publishing in journals being an important status issue, but I think there is other value as well which is being ignored. For all of its annoyances and flaws, one good thing about peer review is that it really makes your paper better. When you submit a pretty good paper to a journal and get back the "revise and resubmit" along with the detailed list of criticisms and suggestions, then by the time the paper actually makes it into the journal, chances are that it will have become a really good paper.

But to return... (read more)

As far as the take-home practical message goes, on my reading it was never about how well doctors could "diagnose cancer" per se based on mammogram results--rather, the reason we ask about P(cancer | positive) is because it ought to inform our decision about whether a biopsy is really warranted. If a healthy young woman from a population with an exceedingly low base rate for breast cancer has a positive mammogram, the prior probability of her having cancer may still be low enough that there might actually be negative expected value in following u... (read more)

Should we go somewhere else to discuss, rather than heavily nested comments? Would a new discussion topic page be the right place?

I agree that the nested comment format is a little cumbersome (in fact, this is a bit of a complaint of mine about the LW format in general), but it's not clear that this discussion warrants an entirely new topic.

Terminology isn't terribly important . . . If you want to take the Popperian conception of a good theory and label it "justified" it doesn't matter so much.

Okay. So what is really at issue here is wheth... (read more)

If i convinced you of this one single issue (that there is a method for making the decision), would you follow up with a thousand other objections to Popperian epistemology, or would we have gotten somewhere?

Yes, we will have gotten somewhere. This issue is my primary criticism of Popperian epistemology. That is, given what I understand about the set of ideas, it is not clear to me how we would go about making practical scientific decisions. With that said, I can't reasonably guarantee that I will not have later objections as well before we've even had ... (read more)

So, how do Popperians decide? They conjecture an answer, e.g. "yes". Actually, they make many conjectures, e.g. also "no". Then they criticize the conjectures, and make more conjectures. So for example I would criticize "yes" for not providing enough explanatory detail about why it's a good idea. Thus "yes" would be rejected, but a variant of it like "yes, because nuclear power plants are safe, clean, and efficient, and all the criticisms of them are from silly luddites" would be better. If I didn't unders

Might it be a good idea to feature the IRC channel more centrally on the website? Eliezer's concern notwithstanding, if I'm going to kill time anyway (and believe me, I'm going to anyway), it might be nice to do so in a busy LW IRC room. I could think of less productive things to do for an hour.

Sure there are associated values. By implying that a particular out-group is "ugly, smelly, no friends, socially unacceptable, negative, aggressive," etc. etc., you simultaneously imply that your in-group is none of those things. You elevate the in-group by derogating the out-group. Presumably you and your in-group value not having all of those negative traits.

If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?

Jones and Nisbett attempted to answer this question in their classic paper on actor-observer bias. It's an interesting read.

However, beware of falling into an overly strict interpretation of situationism (as I think Jones and Nisbett did) which amounts to little more than behaviorism in new clothes. People do tend to underestimate the extent to which their behavior and the behavior of others is driven b... (read more)

Wikipedia has a page on Just-world phenomenon which lists the following references:

Lerner, M, & Simmons, CH. (1966). Observer reaction to the 'innocent victim': Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4 (2): 203–210.

Carli, L.L. (1999). Cognitive reconstruction, hindsight, and reactions to victims and perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 966-979.

Lerner, M.J. & Miller, D.T. (1978). Just world research and the attribution process: Looking back and ahead. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 1030-1051.

I bet... (read more)

I can report with some degree of confidence that the Blanton paper represents a skeptical view which is very much a minority in the field. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's biased or "wrong," but I think a LessWronger such as yourself will understand what this suggests regarding the intellectual status of their claims.

A couple papers to balance out the view from above:

Rebuttal to above by authors of "reanalyzed" study http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/hanges/Ziegert%20and%20Hanges%202009.pdf

Reply to a different but similar Tetlock-and... (read more)

I'm not sure. You may not be able to in any feasible or satisfactory way, which was sort of my point.

This sort of conditioning works best when the reward is administered within about 500 ms of the response (sorry, don't have a citation). Something to keep in mind.

It's also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don't yet have information available on the Internet - in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.

It's not the first possibility, it's the second. I'm quite comfortable in saying that I am very capable at finding specific online content if it's out there to be found. The problem is that most of the disciplines I'm interested in reading about don't have the g... (read more)

That's a pretty good list they have going, but in my opinion the Gigerenzer et al. volume should be replaced by one published 3 years earlier by the same research group: Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. It's the same basic thing, but a bit more comprehensive and more directly relevant to cognitive psych (no chapters on animal rationality and etc).

Also, while the 1982 H&B volume is obviously very good and certainly belongs on the list, the picture is pretty incomplete without the updated 2002 H&B volume as well as Choices, Values, and Frames (1999).

Hi.

I'm a grad student studying social psychology, more or less in the heuristics & biases tradition. I've been loosely following the blog for maybe six months or so. The discussions are always thought provoking and frequently amusing. I hope to participate more in the near future.

Okay, but is it a part of the typical Bayesian routine to wield formal decision theory, or do we just calculate P(H|E) and call it a day?

We could just as easily imagine the selection bias having worked the other way (LessWrongers are hardly a representative sample and some have motivated reasons for choosing one way or another, especially having read through the thread), but you're of course right that, in any case, this sample isn't telling us much.

I thought the baby was cuter... but why bother voting in a meaningless poll like this? (No offense :P)

I mean, not only is the "p-value" threshold arbitrary, not only are we depriving ourselves of valuable information by "accepting" or "not accepting" a hypothesis rather than quantifying our certainty level, but...what about P(E|H)?? (Not to mention P(H).)

Well, P(E|H) is actually pretty easy to calculate under a frequentist framework. That's the basis of power analysis, a topic covered in any good intro stat course. The real missing ingredient, as you point out, is P(H).

I'm not fully fluent in Bayesian statistics, so while I... (read more)

Something is falsifiable if if it is false, it can be proven false.

Isn't this true of anything and everything in mathematics, at least in principle? If there is "certainly an objective truth or falsehood to P = NP," doesn't that make it falsifiable by your definition?

Yeah, that was a pretty clever turn of phrase.

My secret is out!