In spirit I agree with "the real rules have no exceptions". I believe this applies to physics just as well as it applies to decision-making.
But, while the foundational rules of physics are simple and legible, the physics of many particles -- which are needed for managing real-world situations -- includes emergent behaviours like fluid drag and turbulence. The notoriously complex behaviour of fluids can be usefully compressed into rules that are simple enough to remember and apply, such as inviscid or incompressible flow approximations, or tables ...
You're welcome! And I'm sorry if I went a little overboard. I didn't mean it to sound confrontational.
X and ~X will always receive the same score by both the logarithmic and least-squares scoring rules that I described in my post, although I certainly agree that the logarithm is a better measure. If you dispute that point, please provide a numerical example.
Because of the 1/N factor outside the sum, doubling predictions does not affect your calibration score (as it shouldn't!). This factor is necessary or your score would only ever get successively worse the more predictions you make, regardless of how good they are. Thus, including X and ~X in the enumera...
The calibration you get, by the way, will be better represented by the fact that if you assigned 50% to the candidate that lost, then you'll necessarily have assigned a very low probability to the candidate that won, and that will be the penalty that will tell you your calibration is wrong.
The problem is the definition of more specific. How do you define specific? The only consistent definition I can think of is that a proposition A is more specific than B if the prior probability of A is smaller than that of B. Do you have a way to consistently tell wheth...
Yes, but only because I don't agree that there was any useful information that could have been obtained in the first place.
I don't understand why there is so much resistance to the idea that stating "X with probability P(X)" also implies "~X with probability 1-P(X)". The point of assigning probabilities to a prediction is that it represents your state of belief. Both statements uniquely specify the same state of belief, so to treat them differently based on which one you wrote down is irrational. Once you accept that these are the same statement, the conclusion in my post is inevitable, the mirror symmetry of the calibration curve becomes obvious, and given...
"Candidate X will win the election with 50% probability" also implies the proposition "Candidate X will not win the election with 50% probability". If you propose one, you are automatically proposing both, and one will inevitably turn out true and the other false.
If you want to represent your full probability distribution over 10 candidates, you can still represent it as binary predictions. It will look something like this:
Candidate 1 will win the election: 50% probability
Candidate 2 will win the election: 10% probability
Candidate 3 wi...
I'm really not so sure what a frequentist would think. How would they express "Jeb Bush will not be the top-polling Republican candidate" in the form of a repeated random experiment?
It seems to me more likely that a frequentist would object to applying probabilities to such a statement.
I have updated my post to respond to your concerns, expanding on your lottery example in particular. Let me know if I've adequately addressed them.
I intend to update the article later to include log error. Thanks!
The lottery example though is a perfect reason to be careful about how much importance you place on calibration over accuracy.
Thanks, that is indeed a better scoring rule. I did check first to see if the squared error was proper, and it was (since these are binary predictions), but the log rule makes much more sense. I will update the above later when I get home.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your well-considered post. Your departure will be a loss for the community, and sorry to see you go.
I also feel that some of the criticism you're posting here might be due to a misunderstanding, mainly regarding the validity of thought experiments, and of reasoning by analogy. I think both of these have a valid place in rational thought, and have generally been used appropriately in the material you're referring to. I'll make an attempt below to elaborate.
Reasoning by analogy, or, the outside view
What you call "reasoning by analogy&...
Upvotes and downvotes should be added independent of the post's present score [pollid:950]
Upvoted because I think this is a really good point, which is almost totally missed in the surrounding discussion.
For example, it's interesting to see that a lot of the experiments were directly attempting to measure C: The researcher tries to persuade the child to believe something about A, and then measures their performance. But then that research gets translated in the lay press as demonstrating something about A!
I feel that if emr's post were put as a header to Scott's, the amount of confusion in the rebuttals would be reduced considerably.
Incidentall...
That sounds beyond terrible. I really wish I could be of more help. I know exactly how awful it is to have a migraine for one hour, but I cannot fathom what it must be like to live with it perpetually.
Well, here is some general Less Wrong-style advice which I can try to offer. The first thing is that since you have been coping with this for so long, maybe you don't have a clear feeling for how much better life would be without this problem. If these migraines are as bad for you as I imagine they are, then I would recommend that you make curing yourself alm...
I suffered from severe migraines for most of my life, but they were much more frequent when I was younger -- about two or three times a week. During high school they decreased in frequency a lot, to maybe once a month or once every two months, and now that I am in my late '20s, I only get migraines once or twice a year. Unfortunately I can't give you much rationalist advice; although I discussed migraines with my doctor and we worked together to find a solution, to my understanding it's still not a scientifically well-understood problem. So all I can tell ...
The sentence after the Mere Exposure Effect is introduced does not quite parse. Might want to double check it.
A possible distinction between status and dominance: You are everybody's favourite sidekick. You don't dominate or control the group, nor do you want to, nor do you even voice any opinions about what the group should do. You find the idea of telling other people what to do to be unpleasant, and avoid doing so whenever you can. You would much rather be assigned complex tasks and then follow them through with diligence and pride. Everyone wants you in the group, they genuinely value your contribution, they care about your satisfaction with the project, and w...
Ah, hmm.... Maybe! If you include the entire history of the atom, then I'm not actually sure. That's a tough question, and a good question =)
That is not at all true; for example, see the inverse problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_problem). Although the atom's position is uniquely determined by the rest of the universe, the inverse is not true: Multiple different states of the universe could correspond to the same position of the atom. And as long as the atom's position does not uniquely identify the rest of the outside universe, there is no way to infer the state of the universe from the state of the atom, no matter how much precision you can measure it with. The reason is that there...
Really good ending chapter. The presence of Hermione's character totally changes the tone of the story, and reading this one, it became really clear how heavily the Sunshine General was missing from the last ~third or so of the story arc. Eliezer writes her very well, and seems to enjoy writing her too.
I thought Hermione was going to cast an Expecto Patronum at the end, with all the bubbling happiness, but declaring friendship works well too.
Irrelevant thought: Lasers aren't needed to test out the strange optics of Harry's office; positioning mirrors in known positions on the ground and viewing them through a telescope from the tower would already give intriguing results.
The presence of Hermione's character totally changes the tone of the story, and reading this one, it became really clear how heavily the Sunshine General was missing from the last ~third or so of the story arc. Eliezer writes her very well, and seems to enjoy writing her too.
Harry's world was bleak without Hermione. Harry's love for Hermione, and even love for Humanity in general, had been missing for a while. He largely went into young Tom Riddle mode for a long time, without Hermione's influence.
Harry:
...Being friends with you means that my life doesn'
I hope that somebody (well, Harry) tells Michael MacNair that his father, alone among those summoned, died in combat with Voldemort. It seems sad for him not to know that.
According to Descartes: for any X, P(X exists | X is taking the survey) = 100%, and also that 100% certainty of anything on the part of X is only allowed in this particular case.
Therefore, if X says they are Atheist, and that P(God exists | X is taking the survey) = 100%, then X is God, God is taking the survey, and happens to be an Atheist.
A note about calibration...
A poor showing on some questions, such as "what is the best-selling computer game", doesn't necessarily reflect poor calibration. It might instead simply mean that "the best-selling game is Minecraft" is a surprising fact to this particular community.
For example, I may have never heard of Minecraft, but had a large amount of exposure to evidence that "the best-selling game is Starcraft", or "the best-selling game is Tetris". During the time when I did play computer games, which was before t...
A tennis ball is a multi-particle system; however, all of the particles are accelerating more or less in unison while the ball free-falls. Nonetheless, it isn't usually considered to be increasing in temperature, because the entropy isn't increasing much as it falls.
Oh good point! And if you don't know the context when performing the translation (perhaps it's an announcement at an all-girls or an all-boys school?), then the translation will be incorrect.
The ambiguity in the original sentence may be impossible to preserve in the translation process, which doesn't mean that translation is impossible, but it does mean that information must be added by the translator to the sentence that wasn't present in the original sentence.
Sometimes I do small contract translation jobs as a side activity, but it's very frustrating when a client sends me snippets of text to be translated without the full context.
Yes..... you may be right, and it is a compelling reason, for example, not to admit terrorists into a country.
I suppose that if a particular individual's admission into the country would depress the entire country by a sufficient amount, then that's a fair reason to keep them out, without worrying about valuing different peoples' utilities unequally.
That's fine. Do you consider yourself a utilitarian? Many people do not.
For that matter, following Illano's line of thought, it's not clear that the amount that poor people would appreciate receiving all of my possessions is greater than the amount of sadness I would suffer from losing everything I own. (Although if I was giving it away out of a feeling of moral inclination to do so, I would presumably be happy with my choice). I'm not sure what George Price was thinking exactly.
Yes, of course. But the net average quality of life is increased overall. Please examine the posts that I'm replying to here, for the context of the point I am making. For convenience I've copied it below:
How many billion people would be better off if allowed to immigrate to GB? Utilitarianism is about counting everyone's utility the same...
You can't fit billions of people in the UK.
If you are entering the argument with a claim that the UK's current inhabitants can be utilitarian and simultaneously weigh their own utility higher than those of other ...
You can't fit billions of people in the UK. ( I guess that's not what you meant, but that's what it sounds like)
The gain in quality of life from moving to the UK would gradually diminish as the island became overcrowded, until there was no net utility gain from people moving there anymore. Unrestricted immigration is not the same thing as inviting all seven billion humans to the UK. People will only keep immigrating until the average quality of life is the same in the UK as it is anywhere else; then there will be an equilibrium.
I admit that I found this really disturbing too.
I think that it is intended as an exercise. Put yourself in the mindset of an average 18th or 19th-century individual, and imagine the 21st century as an idealized future. Things seem pretty wonderful; machines do most of the work, medicines cure disease, air travel lets you get anywhere on the planet in a single day.
But then, what?! Women can vote, and run businesses? And legalized gay marriage?!! How shocking and disturbing.
It's almost a given that the future's values will drift apart from ours, although we...
Aside from the fact that having godly power doesn't necessarily correlate well with an ease of understanding life-forms...
The universe less like a carefully painted mural in which humans and other life forms were mapped out in exquisite and intricate detail, and more like a big empty petri dish set in a warm spot billions of years ago. The underlying specifications for creating the universe seem to be pretty simple mathematically (a few laws and some low-entropy initial conditions). The complex part is just the intricate structures that have arisen over time.
Ah, too bad! I'm just about to move out of Tokyo. I would have loved to participate in a LW gathering here otherwise.
There's a ~20% chance that I will be back in Tokyo next year, for a period of a few years. So you can count me as 1/5th of an 'interested' response
Player 2 observes "not A" as a choice. Doesn't player 2 still need to estimate the relative probabilities that B was chosen vs. that C was chosen?
Of course Player 2 doesn't have access to Player 1's source code, but that's not an excuse to set those probabilities in a completely arbitrary manner. Player 2 has to decide the probability of B in a rational way, given the available (albeit scarce) evidence, which is the payoff matrix and the fact that A was not chosen.
It seems reasonable to imagine a space of strategies which would lead player 1 to n...
How does this work for a binary quantity?
If your experiment tells you that [x > 45] with 99% confidence, you may in certain cases be able to confidently transform that to [x > 60] with 95% confidence.
For example, if your experiment tells you that the mass of the Q particle is 1.5034(42) with 99% confidence, maybe you can say instead that it's 1.50344(2) with 95% confidence.
If your experiment happens to tell you that [particle Q exists] is true with 99% confidence, what kind of transformation can you apply to get 95% confidence instead? Discard some of your evidence? Add noise into your sensor readings?
I think my opinion is the same as yours, but I'm curious about whether anybody else has different answers.
Good! I'm glad to hear an answer like this.
So does that mean that, in your view, a drug that removes consciousness must necessarily be a drug that impairs the ability to process information?
Maybe you're on to something...
Imagine there were drugs that could remove the sensation of consciousness. However, that's all they do. They don't knock you unconscious like an anaesthetic; you still maintain motor functions, memory, sensory, and decision-making capabilities. So you can still drive a car safely, people can still talk to you coherently, and after the drugs wear off you'll remember what things you said and did.
Can anyone explain concretely what the effect and experience of taking such a drug would be?
If so, that might go a long way toward nai...
Well, unlike a fundamental theory of physics, we don't have strong reasons to expect that consciousness is indescribable in any more basic terms. I think there's a confusion of levels here... GR is a description of how a 4-dimensional spacetime can function and precisely reproduces our observations of the universe. It doesn't describe how that spacetime was born into existence because that's an answer to a different question than the one Einstein was asking.
In the case of consciousness, there are many things we don't know, such as:
1: Can we rigorously draw...
Since GR is essentially a description of the behaviour of spacetime, it isn't GR's job to explain why spacetime exists. More generally, it isn't the job of any theory to explain why that theory is true; it is the job of the theory to be true. Nobody expects [theory X] to include a term that describes the probability of the truth of [theory X], so lacking this property does not deduct points.
There may be a deeper theory that will describe the conditions under which spacetime will or will not exist, and give recipes for cooking up spacetimes with various pro...
I am intrinsically contrarian.
Is this a reason, or a bias?
Climate scientists have never made a public falsifiable prediction.
How would you update your beliefs if you learned that this statement is false?
Oil is cleaner than coal, so if C02 emissions are restricted, the oil industry will probably benefit.
Would you therefore like to offer me the odds on a prediction that, if we investigated the funding sources of various pro- and anti- AGW campaigns and think tanks, we would find that oil companies are predominantly sponsoring pro-AGW think tanks and stronger emissions legislation?
Good, I just wanted to be clear. In my experience that "alarmist" usually does strongly imply that the predictions of danger are unjustified, and that interpretation (which I presume most readers default to) risks changing the intended meaning of your statement that "climate scientists[...] are often quite alarmist."
Now that I re-read your top-level post knowing what you meant, I think I understand much better what you are saying.
By "alarmist", I meant making dire predictions, not sounding panicked when they do
If you don't mind, I would like to probe your usage of this term...
What distinction do you draw between "alarmist" and "alarming"?
If the hypothetical situation is such that the truth really is properly dire, are accurate reports of this dire truth best classified as "alarmist"?
How should you react when, one night in the laboratory, you make an alarming discovery with fairly high confidence? After having them independently verified, would you consider yourself an "alarmist" for reporting your own findings?
Yes and I fully agree with you. I am just being pedantic about this point:
I can only update my beliefs based on the evidence I do have, not on the evidence I lack.
I agree with this philosophy, but my argument is that the following is evidence we do not have:
Due to Snowden and other leakers, we actually know what NSA's cutting-edge strategies involve[...]
Since I have little confidence that, if the NSA had advanced tech, Snowden would have disclosed it; the absence of this evidence should be treated as quite weak evidence of absence and therefore I w...
I do think you're probably right, and I fully agree about the space lasers and their solid diamond heatsinks being categorically different than a crypto wizard who subsists on oatmeal in the Siberian wilderness on pennies of income. So I am somewhat skeptical of CivilianSvendsen's claim.
But, for the sake of completeness, did Snowden leak the entirety of the NSA's secrets? Or just the secret-court-surveillance-conspiracy ones that he felt were violating the constitutional rights of Americans? As far as I can tell (though I haven't followed the story recentl...
I don't know much about the NSA, but FWIW, I used to harbour similar ideas about US military technology -- I didn't believe that it could be significantly ahead of commercially available / consumer-grade technology, because if the technological advances had already been discovered by somebody, then the intensity of the competition and the magnitude of the profit motive would lead it to quickly spread into general adoption. So I had figured that, in those areas where there is an obvious distinction between military and commercial grade technology, it would ...
I think that a 'reductive' explanation of quantum mechanics might not be as appealing as it seems to you.
Those fluid mechanics experiments are brilliant, and I'm deeply impressed by them for coming up with them, let alone putting it into practice! However, I don't find it especially convincing as a model of subatomic reality. Just like the case with early 20th-century analog computers, with a little ingenuity it's almost always possible to build a (classical) mechanism that will obey the same math as almost any desired system.
Definitely, to the point that ...
Thanks!
I think my point is different, although I have to admit I don't entirely grasp your objection to Nostalgebraist's objection. I think Nostalgebraist's point about rules being gameable does overlap with my example of multi-agent systems, because clear-but-only-approximately-correct rules are exploitable. But I don't think my argument is about it being hard to identify legitimate exceptions. In fact, astrophysicists would have no difficulty identifying when it's the right time to stop using Newtonian gravity.
But my point with t... (read more)