Context: I read Eliezer Yudkowski's post "Frequentist statistics are frequently subjective" and it inspired me to get a better first-principles understanding of some statistical concepts. Now these are my personal thoughts about the topic. Don't believe me; if I had attached confidence intervals to the results of my investigation, they...
I'm not a biologist, but I'm trying to get something like a gears-level understanding of the situation we are in. There are phenomena that seem superficially clear to me, but if I'm honest, I do not really understand what's going on. For example, take the new Covid variants from Great...
[Slider thankfully has pointed out some flaws in parts of my argumentation and I recommend you to also read Slider's comment.] Everybody who wants to have agency over one's live should believe two things. Firstly, there is an objective truth about the world in which we live. Secondly, we can...
Thanks for your scrutiny :) (and sorry for the long-winded response...)
Let me try to clarify the bottom line of the post:
This post clarifies some subtle points about the ways in which confidence intervals are useful. In the way that a confidence interval is defined mathematically (as far as I understand), without any further axioms, it does not give lots of guarantees. As a side note, the NIH claim seems to be just wrong (and is not what I suppose to be the standard definition the rest of the article is about), and there isn't any method of attaching confidence intervals that can live up to their claim.
It's not that we shouldn't use... (read more)
Context: I read Eliezer Yudkowski's post "Frequentist statistics are frequently subjective" and it inspired me to get a better first-principles understanding of some statistical concepts. Now these are my personal thoughts about the topic. Don't believe me; if I had attached confidence intervals to the results of my investigation, they would be very broad!
Confidence intervals frequently cause confusion. For example, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) claim in their course on "Finding and using health statistics":
... (read 829 more words →)Confidence intervals are frequently reported in scientific literature and indicate how close research results are to reality, or how reliable they are, based on statistical theory. The confidence interval uses the sample to estimate the interval
Nice list! :)
A little side note: I think
The risk of a reporting error by the CDC
might also count as a factor that could lead to "this question being a NO".
Nice discovery! I will look into it.
In my naive understanding, I imagine that each strain only infects a small fraction of all cells, so that two strains should rarely infect the same cell. On the other hand, the abstract explicitly mentions competition between strains, suggesting that there must be connection to multiple infection of cells.
So could I summarize this as follows? The MPG asserts in the linked article that the rapid evolution might arise from pre-existing immunity in a population because of some "increasing [...] selection pressure". On the other hand, you argue since that the new variants did not just change superficially to evade being recognized but seemed to have adapted to the human host, and this is not what one would expect if the main driving force would be immune evasion.
Thanks for you response -- if you have any thoughts to this proposal for a summary, I'd be very interested.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm trying to get something like a gears-level understanding of the situation we are in. There are phenomena that seem superficially clear to me, but if I'm honest, I do not really understand what's going on.
For example, take the new Covid variants from Great Britain, South Africa and India. It is often said that the danger for such mutations is higher if a population already has some immunity because it increases the selection pressure. First, I thought "that's obvious, it's just how evolution works". But, how exactly does this work?
Here is my current understanding:
* Viruses do not have a metabolism, which is why I suspect that there... (read 179 more words →)
Regarding logic and methods of knowing, I agree that logic might not be the only useful way of knowledge production, but why shouldn't you have it in your toolbox? I'm just trying to argue that there's no reason for anyone to neglect logical arguments if they yield new knowledge.
I agree that "prior" is a vastly better word choice than "axiom" because it allows us to refine the prior later.
The "planetary consciousness" thing also appears to me as a misunderstanding: I don't want to propose that every information about the world should be retrieved and processed, in the same way that even in my direct environment, what my neighbour does in his house is none of my business.
How do you differentiate between "Truth" and "truth"? I would really appreciate some clarification regarding these two words because it would help me to understand your comment better. Thanks :)
I'm very grateful that you bring up these points. Sorry for the long response, but I like your comment and would like to write down some thoughts on each part of it.
One doesn't need to assume an objective reality if one wants to be agentic. One can believe that 1) Stuff you do influences your prosperity 2) It is possible select for more prosperous influences.
First of all, I think choosing the term "objective" in my post was a too strong, and not quite well-defined. (My post also seems at risk of circular reasoning because it somehow tries to argue for rationality using rationality.)
I really should have thought more about this paragraph. You... (read 466 more words →)
[Slider thankfully has pointed out some flaws in parts of my argumentation and I recommend you to also read Slider's comment.]
Everybody who wants to have agency over one's live should believe two things. Firstly, there is an objective truth about the world in which we live. Secondly, we can partially discover this world: There are ways in which we can get an approximate understanding of what's true.
However, questions remain even if these things are taken for granted. My which methods can we get to this truth, and how precise can our approximation get?
It's quite clear for me (and I did not think of these issues myself but believe that they are well-covered... (read 734 more words →)
I think Zvi calls this a hostile epistemic environment since there are actors that try really hard to produce convincing propaganda. Maybe a helpful heuristic is this: Are there checks and balanches for the media? As far as I know, this is hardly the case in Russia right now since independent media outlets have been shut down and you can be jailed for expressing your sincere opinion. This is a very bad sign. (If there were some kind of freedom of speech, more people would be scrutinizing important claims, so that not hearing these critics would be evidence for the truthfulness of these claims, I guess.) Unfortunately, the EU also started blocking... (read 356 more words →)