All of cupholder's Comments + Replies

This one felt quite LW-relevant:

If $1 million makes you happy, that doesn't mean $10 million will make you 10 times as happy.

It's good to be reminded now and then that dollars are not, in fact, utilons.

1shokwave
The natural logarithm of dollars is a pretty good approximation of utilons, assuming you like candy-bars.

The lack of an automatic repair mechanism makes things hairier, but while frozen, the radiation damage will be localized to the cells that get hit by radiation. By the time you get the tech to revive people from cryonic freezing, you'll most likely have the tech to fix/remove/replace the individual damaged cells before reviving someone. I think you're right that radiation won't be a big limiting factor, though it may be an annoying obstacle.

I don't know so much about C-14, but wouldn't potassium decay's effects be small on timescales ~10,000 years? The radioactive natural isotope K-40 has a ridiculously long half life (1.25 billion years, which is why potassium-argon dating is popular for dating really old things) and only composes 0.012% of natural potassium. Potassium's also much less abundant in the body than carbon - only about 140g of a 70kg person is potassium, although admittedly it might be more concentrated in the brain, which is the important part.

ETA - I did calculations, and maybe... (read more)

2JoshuaZ
I don't have enough background to estimate how serious the decay would be. But with 1.40e15 decays after 10,000 years that's around 3000 decay events a second (in practice most of that will be in the first few thousand years given that decay occurs exponentially). It seems that part of the issue also is that there's no repair mechanism. When something is living it can take a fair bit of radiation with minimal negative results. In some circumstances living creatures can even benefit from low levels of radiation. But radiation is going to be much more damaging to cells when they can't engage in any repairs. Edit:Also note that the majority of the radiation that people are subject to is from potassium 40 so if this is ok then we're generally ok. It seems that radiation is not a major limiting factor on long-term cryonic storage.

This is a nice example of the slipperiness I sometimes notice when I think about how one could test an ev. psych hypothesis. My first thought after reading your comment was 'but won't all those factors be just as correlated with unhappiness and depression as with genetic fitness? Surely there's a less complex explanation here: unhappy people don't like living as much, so they try killing themselves more.'

Then I thought a little more and realized that could also have an ev. psych basis: maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we're unhappy with life. B... (read more)

0Strange7
I've noticed that psychological descriptions of suicidal depression involve not just crushing unhappiness in general, but also isolation. Is it possible that suicide evolved as a society-level equivalent to the cellular mechanism of apoptosis? A tribe whose least productive, least connected members voluntarily wander away to self-terminate might have a significant competitive advantage in terms of food production per member, without the runaway perverse-incentive stuff Enron got caught in. This isn't just a group-selection thing, either. Given that you're going to be providing preferential treatment to your close relatives anyway, having a genetic predisposition for suicide means that such intrafamilial charity is less likely to be wasted on hopeless causes, since the hopeless ones don't stick around.
0NancyLebovitz
Also, are we evolved to abuse people with possibly low genetic fitness? To create low genetic fitness if it gives us a genetic fitness advantage?

'Why would I need to demand evidence? My wife freely gives me evidence of her love, all the time!'

I had a similar discussion with a family member, about the existence of the Christian god, where I received that exact response. My wife was sitting right there. I responded with something along the lines of, "True, but my 'faith' in her love is already backed up by evidence, and besides, I have plenty of evidence that she exists. If there was evidence for God and evidence of His love, I would happily put faith in that too."

But I agree - it definitely caused me to pause to consider a tactful response.

2simplicio
My reply was in this vein, essentially. But it's still a sneaky bugger of a question.
7wedrifid
And the proper name for a wife that doesn't freely give evidence of her love is an ex-wife!

Maybe the salesman mostly sells temporary life insurance, and just means that no clients had died while covered?

I'm sorry, this is just an open thread comment, not a top-level post. Aren't we allowed to just chat and get feedback without thoroughly contemplating a subject?

There's nobody compelling you to reply to the comments you feel are too thoroughly contemplating a subject.

Who's right? Who knows. It's a fine opportunity to remain skeptical.

Bullshit. The 'skeptical' thing to do would be to take 30 seconds to think about the theory's physical plausibility before posting it on one's blog, not regurgitate the theory and cover one's ass with an I'm-so-balanced-look-there's-two-sides-to-the-issue fallacy.

TV-frequency EM radiation is non-ionizing, so how's it going to transfer enough energy to your cells to cause cancer? It could heat you up, or it could induce currents within your body. But however much heating it causes, the... (read more)

0[anonymous]
Neither that nor the rest of your 'graf is a decisive argument against a causal connection. And unless you can increase my probability that there are no subsystems of the human body that can resonate at TV frequencies, I will continue in my tentative belief that TV-frequency EM might still cause a problem even if sub-kilohertz EM does not. Very good point about, "It's interesting," though. "It's interesting," should be a good reason only to teenagers still learning to find pleasure in learning new science.

it's at least a little silly for Kottke to say he's posting it because it's 'interesting' and not because it's 'right'

Yup, that's the bit I thought made it appropriate for LW.

It reminded me of my speculations on "asymmetric intellectual warfare" - we are bombarded all day long with things that are "interesting" in one sense or another but should still be dismissed outright, if only because paying attention to all of them would leave us with nothing left over for worthwhile items.

But we can also note regularities in the patterns of wh... (read more)

Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he's not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?

I wouldn't read anything into the lack of response, EY often doesn't comment on meta-discussion. In fact I'd guess there's a good chance he hasn't even seen this thread!

I guess it might be worth raising this in the Spring 2010 meta-thread? Come to think of it, it's been 4+ months since that meta thread was started - it may even be worth someone posting a Summer 2010 meta-thread with this as a topic starter.

1[anonymous]
Okay then. Well I don't have the karma to start a thread so I'll leave it to someone who has if they think it's worth while. If nothing else, I wondered about the possibility of doing a top level post expressly for this purpose. So people could post an article with the idea being that comments in response would be aimed at improving it, rather than just general comments. And the further understanding that the original article would then be edited and people could comment on this new one. If the post got a good enough response after a few drafts, it could then be posted at the top level. Otherwise, it would be a good lesson anyway. It would also be less cluttered because it would all be within that purpose made, top level post.

I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."

I think your houseguest might not have read a representative selection of LW posts; their assessment doesn't ring true for me. I haven't read WrongBot's top-level posts closely (nothing personal - the evolutionary psychology stuff just isn't that interesting to me), but I've skimmed ... (read more)

1whpearson
Mine was intentionally low quality. I don't have the patience for long essays, and thought it was an interesting hypothesis and worth sharing for that reason.

Enthusiastically seconded.

The only change I'd make is to hide editorial comments when the post leaves editing (instead of deleting them), with a toggle option for logged-in users to carry on viewing them.

Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.

I think it is. There are several tricks we could use to... (read more)

3[anonymous]
It seems like there's at least some interesting in doing something to deal with helping people to develop posting skills through a means other than simply writing lots of articles and bombarding the community with them. The editorial system seems like it has a lot of promising aspects. The main thing is, it seems more valuable to implement a weak system than to simply talk about implementing a stronger system so whether the editorial system is the best that can be done depends on whether the people in charge of the community are interested in implementing it. If they turn out to not be, I still wonder whether there's a few people out there that can volunteer to help make posts better and a few people who can volunteer to not bombard LW but instead to develop their skills in a quieter way (nb: that doesn't refer to anyone in particular except, potentially, myself). Personally, I still think that would be useful, even if suboptimal. Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he's not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?

Upvoted for raising the topic, but the approach I'd prefer is jimrandomh's suggestion of having all posts pass through an editorial stage before being posted 'for real.'

I'm open to suggestions for how I might improve the introduction to the article to make the article more palatable.

I was going to suggest this, but I see you've already added it: thanks for editing in your definition of capitalism at the top of the post. When I first read the post, that was something I thought would improve it. Like SilasBarta I thought it was a bad idea to leave unclear what you were counting as capitalism.

I think that's a clever idea that deserves more eyeballs.

Done. I'm looking forward to either Nancy's substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated.

It seems to me that the issue's already been complicated because you've already replied to Nancy impolitely. Now that's happened, it is not really realistic to expect a substantive reply and apology from her simply because you (I, if we're being pedantic) rephrased some of your original remarks more tactfully.

Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she sh

... (read more)

The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question.

There's no explicit question in the comment of NL's I think you're thinking of, so I imagine you mean that the statements in her comment could be read as implying an already-answered question, which makes the comment rude. That hardly registers on my rudeness detector; unless it's part of a systematic pattern of behavior, it's innocuous IMO.

Still, let me pretend I... (read more)

-4SilasBarta
Done. I'm looking forward to either Nancy's substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated. Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she shouldn't have replied to begin with if that was all she had to say. The general point of yours (which I agree with) about the impossibility of replying to everything, doesn't apply.

I don't think I'm capable of answering that question, since I'm not seeing the 'rudeness' in the parent comment posted by Nancy to which your linked comment replies. At any rate, I didn't find that particular comment of yours obnoxious except for the 'pity party' snark, which I basically just wrote off as your usual level of prickliness.

-1SilasBarta
The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question (the one I replied to and, in doing so, was deemed obnoxious). So: 1) I explain why having wide feet leads to people being prejudiced against me. 2) Nancy replies, while ignoring the entire explanation I just gave. 3) [Insert comment I should have made instead of the one I did, which would point out how Nancy just ignored the explanation I gave, but which you don't characterize as obnoxious] The reason I belabor the point is that this issue comes up quite frequently, where people complain that "Yeah, Silas, you had a good point, but goshdarnit, the way you said it gives me sufficient pretense to ignore it wholesale and join the anti-Silas's point bandwagon", and I want someone to finally put their neck out and show me what comment would be an appropriate one to protest the (rude) ignoring of part of my comment when someone replies to it.

Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you? Or just the fact of me mentioning this ignoranc ... er, "act of ignoring".

Neither. I found the manner in which you mentioned it obnoxious, not the mention qua mention.

This is what always gets me: no one cares when someone doesn't read a comment and yet still replies to it -- well, to a version of it. Yet when someone points out the rudeness of doing so -- well, then that perso

... (read more)
-3SilasBarta
Just so we're on the same page, could you please give an example of things I could have said instead for this comment, which you would not find obnoxious, but which would point out the rudeness and error on Nancy's part?

Not one of the downvoters, but the tone of these paragraphs was so overcooked I did consider it for a couple seconds:

And frankly, when the asymmetic bra issue came up, I got pretty scared. Some of the commenters -- and I'm not going to single anyone out -- sound like really angry people in general and I fear that being around them would make their rage spill on to me.

They have this entitlement mentality, where everyone has to make clothes that they like. I think it's what motivates a lot of the crime against retailers.

I mean, how dare they make clothes f

... (read more)
-9SilasBarta

Having thought about it a little longer and updated based on your evidently broader knowledge of bras, my original guess for why the market failure exists does seem pretty unlikely.

what interpretation of the word "probability" does allow you to think that the probability of something is 1 and then change to something other than 1?

Any interpretation where you can fix a broken model. I can imagine a conversation like this...

Prankster: I'm holding a die behind my back. If I roll it, what probability would you assign to a 1 coming up?

cupholder: Is it loaded?

Prankster: No.

cupholder: Are you throwing it in a funny way, like in one of those machines that throws it so it's really likely to come up a 6 or something?

Prankster: No,... (read more)

You're right, I should've thought of that. I expect it's easier (maybe therefore cheaper?) to manufacture little silicone blobs or whatever than a half-bra, which must partly be why there's a market for the first and not the second.

8Alicorn
It wouldn't be hard to manufacture a half-bra. They already have bras that clasp in front and ones that clasp in the back; there is no obvious structural reason why they couldn't make one that does both and then sell the parts separately. In fact, based on the sorts of bras that already exist, it wouldn't be that hard to have a bunch of bins of detached bra parts that could be assembled in any fashion desired. There are bras with detachable straps, too, so there's clearly no structural reason they have to be permanently affixed and therefore no reason they couldn't be swapped out consumer-side for preferred versions. Most women wear bras that do not fit because there are so many things that need to be right and custom-made ones run into the hundreds of dollars. But it seems an obvious market failure that I can't go into a store, pick out a left cup and a right cup and the straps of my choice, and walk out with something that will work better for me than anything I could find in Target without significant extra expense.

There's an even more compelling market: women who have had a single mastectomy. I'd be surprised if there weren't medical half-bras out there already for them.

4Alicorn
It wouldn't surprise me. It's cosmetically expected that asymmetries like that be corrected for the visual benefit of others (and for the purpose of making clothes fit) with fills or some other sort of padding. That's also the suggestion I've tended to get when I've expressed a wish for half-bras.

These results seem to support that, though there have also been contradictory reports from people saying that the very aggressiveness was what made them actually think.

Presumably there's heterogeneity in people's reactions to aggressiveness and to soft approaches. Most likely a minority of people react better to aggressive approaches and most people react better to being fed opposing arguments in a sandwich with self-affirmation bread.

The negotiation of where LW threads should be on the 4chan-colloquium continuum is something I would let users handle by interacting with each other in discussions, instead of trying to force it to fit the framework of the karma system. I especially think letting people hide their posts from lurkers and other subsets of the Less Wrong userbase could set a bad precedent.

So would it be right to say your objection is based on the expected utility of working cryonics instead of its probability?

For being a cryonics facility? Is there enough evidence to determine if it could've been just a random drive-by?

1Paul Crowley
I'm afraid all I know about it is a brief remark from Mike Darwin somewhere in this sequence of videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/KoanPhilosopher#grid/user/B6A98520CF2F56AC

But if we start with a prior over all possible six-sided dice and do Bayesian updating, we get a different answer that diverges from fairness more and more as the number of throws goes to infinity!

In this example, what information are we Bayesian updating on?

yes

OK. I agree with that insofar as agents having the same prior entails them having the same model.

aaahhh.... I changed the language of that sentence at least three times before settling on what you saw. Here's what I probably should have posted (and what I was going to post until the last minute):

There's no model checking because there is only one model - the correct model.

That is probably intuitively easier to grasp, but I think a bit inconsistent with my language in the rest of the post. The language is somewhat difficult here because our unce

... (read more)

My implicit definition of perfect Bayesian is characterized by these propostions:

  1. There is a correct prior probability (as in, before you see any evidence, e.g. occam priors) for every proposition
  2. Given a particular set of evidence, there is a correct posterior probability for any proposition

OK, this is interesting: I think our ideas of perfect Bayesians might be quite different. I agree that #1 is part of how a perfect Bayesian thinks, if by 'a correct prior...before you see any evidence' you have the maximum entropy prior in mind.

I'm less sure wha... (read more)

1Matt_Simpson
They most certainly are. But it's semantics. Frankly, I'm not informed enough about priors commit to maxent, Kolmogorov complexity, or anything else. yes aaahhh.... I changed the language of that sentence at least three times before settling on what you saw. Here's what I probably should have posted (and what I was going to post until the last minute): That is probably intuitively easier to grasp, but I think a bit inconsistent with my language in the rest of the post. The language is somewhat difficult here because our uncertainty is simultaneously a map and a territory. For the record, I thought this sentence was perfectly clear. But I am a statistics grad student, so don't consider me representative. Are you asserting that this a catch for my position? Or the "never look back" approach to priors? What you are saying seems to support my argument.
1cousin_it
Allow me to introduce to you the Brandeis dice problem. We have a six-sided die, sides marked 1 to 6, possibly unfair. We throw it many times (say, a billion) and obtain an average value of 3.5. Using that information alone, what's your probability distribution for the next throw of the die? A naive application of the maxent approach says we should pick the distribution over {1,2,3,4,5,6} with mean 3.5 and maximum entropy, which is the uniform distribution; that is, the die is fair. But if we start with a prior over all possible six-sided dice and do Bayesian updating, we get a different answer that diverges from fairness more and more as the number of throws goes to infinity! The reason: a die that's biased towards 3 and 4 makes a mean value of 3.5 even more likely than a fair die. Does that mean you should give up your belief in maxent, your belief in Bayes, your belief in the existence of "perfect" priors for all problems, or something else? You decide.

I'm not sure about this. It's most likely that anything your kid does in life will get done by someone else instead.

True - we might call the expected utility strangers get a wash because of this substitution effect. If we say the expected value most people get from me having a child is nil, it doesn't contribute to the net expected value, but nor does it make it less positive.

There is also some evidence that having children decreases your happiness (though there may be other reasons to have kids).

It sounds as though that data's based on samples of a... (read more)

Points taken.

Let me restate what I mean more formally. Conditional on high living standards, high-quality parenting, and desire to raise a child, one can reasonably calculate that the expected utility (to myself, to the potential child and to others) of having the child is higher than the expected utility of not having a child. In which case I wouldn't think the antinatalism position has legs.

5Blueberry
I'm not sure about this. It's most likely that anything your kid does in life will get done by someone else instead. There is also some evidence that having children decreases your happiness (though there may be other reasons to have kids). But even if this is true, it's still not enough for antinatalism. Increasing total utility is not enough justification to create a life. The act of creation makes you responsible for the utility of the individual created, and you have a duty not to create an entity you have reason to think may have negative personal utility. (Strict utilitarians will disagree.)
6NancyLebovitz
I'd throw in considering how stable you think those high living standards are.

After the fact model checking is completely incompatible with perfect Bayesianism, if we define perfect Bayesianism as

  1. Define a model with some parameters.
  2. Pick a prior over the parameters.
  3. Collect evidence.
  4. Calculate the likelihood using the evidence and model.
  5. Calculate the posterior by multiplying the prior by the likelihood.
  6. When new evidence comes in, set the prior to the posterior and go to step 4.

There's no step for checking if you should reject the model; there's no provision here for deciding if you 'just have really wrong priors.' In practice,... (read more)

3Matt_Simpson
My implicit definition of perfect Bayesian is characterized by these propostions: 1. There is a correct prior probability (as in, before you see any evidence, e.g. occam priors) for every proposition 2. Given a particular set of evidence, there is a correct posterior probability for any proposition If we knew exactly what our priors were and how to exactly calculate our posteriors, then your steps 1-6 is exactly how we should operate. There's no model checking because there is no model. The problem is, we don't know these things. In practice we can't exactly calculate our posteriors or precisely articulate our priors. So to approximate the correct posterior probability, we model our uncertainty about the proposition(s) in question. This includes every part of the model - the prior and the sampling model in the simplest case. The rationale for model checking should be pretty clear at this point. How do we know if we have a good model of our uncertainty (or a good map of our map, to say it a different way)? One method is model checking. To forbid model checking when we know that we are modeling our uncertainty seems to be restricting the methods we can use to approximate our posteriors for no good reason. Now I don't necessarily think that Cox, Jaynes, Yudkowsky, or any other famous Bayesian agrees with me here. But when we got to model checking in my Bayes class, I spent a few days wondering how it squared with the Baysian philosophy of induction, and then what I took to be obvious answer came to me (while discussing it with my professor actually): we're modeling our uncertainty. Just like we check our models of physics to see if they correspond to what we are trying to describe (reality), we should check our models of our uncertainty to see if they correspond to what we are trying to describe. I would be interested to hear EY's position on this issue though.

Do people here really think that antinatalism is silly?

A data point: I don't think antinatalism (as defined by Roko above - 'it is a bad thing to create people') is silly under every set of circumstances, but neither is it obviously true under all circumstances. If my standard of living is phenomenally awful, and I knew my child's life would be equally bad, it'd be bad to have a child. But if I were living it up, knew I could be a good parent, and wanted a kid, what would be so awful about having one?

6Blueberry
That your child might experience a great deal of pain which you could prevent by not having it. That your child might regret being born and wish you had made the other decision. That you can be a good parent, raise a kid, and improve someone's life without having a kid (adopt). That the world is already overpopulated and our natural resources are not infinite.

A good illustration of multiple discovery (not strictly 'discovery' in this case, but anyway) too:

While Ettinger was the first, most articulate, and most scientifically credible person to argue the idea of cryonics,[citation needed] he was not the only one. In 1962, Evan Cooper had authored a manuscript entitled Immortality, Scientifically, Physically, Now under the pseudonym "N. Durhing".[8] Cooper's book contained the same argument as did Ettinger's, but it lacked both scientific and technical rigor and was not of publication quality.[citation needed]

In the long run, it's all good - I think it's a decent paper, and I suppose this way more eyeballs see it than if I was the only one to post it. (Not to say that we should make a regular habit of linking things four times :-)

My understanding is that historically, schizophrenia has been presumed to have a partly genetic cause since around 1910, out of which grew an intermittent research program of family and twin studies to probe schizophrenia genetics. An opposing camp that emphasized environmental effects emerged in the wake of the Nazi eugenics program and the realization that complex psychological traits needn't follow trivial Mendelian patterns of inheritance. Both research traditions continue to the present day.

Edit to add - Franz Josef Kallman, whose bibliography in schi... (read more)

3NancyLebovitz
Thanks. You clearly know more about this than I do. I just had a vague impression.
3NancyLebovitz
My impression was that the idea that schizophrenia runs in families was dismissed as an old wives' tale, but a fast google search isn't turning up anything along those lines, though it does seem that some Freudians believed schizophenia was a mental rather than physical disorder.

Agreed. I wish they'd stick to calling hard-to-read graphics like this 'visualizations' - the word 'infographics' implies a graphic designed to efficiently display information.

The worst part is it wouldn't be hard to improve the graphic. They could drop the annoying 84-item list and just directly write the emotions in the 84 slots around the circle instead of using numbers. Enlarge the circle and blow up the font size a bit - then they can put the A to J list of cultures into the empty middle of the circle so you don't have to keep looking off the side to ... (read more)

See also 'crank magnetism.'

I wonder if this counts as evidence for my heuristic of judging how seriously to take someone's belief on a complicated scientific subject by looking to see if they get the right answer on easier scientific questions.

1steven0461
I thought I did a search but apparently not; sorry.
2DanielVarga
And I still managed to miss it the first three times.

It might well have been clear from the quote itself, but not to me - I just read the quote as saying Bayesian thinking and Bayesian methods haven't become more popular in science, which doesn't mesh with my intuition/experience.

I don't know of a way to get superscripts with Markdown markup, but if you pull up your Windows Character Map (or your operating system's equivalent), there should be superscript 1 and 2 characters to paste in.

I'd have expected that men would lie about having more partners rather than fewer, but that might be mere stereotyping on my part.

Or maybe the sample's not representative of most men - the sample was of Midwestern psychology undergraduate students.

It's apparently been put to use with some success. Clark Glymour - a philosophy professor who helped develop TETRAD - wrote a long review of The Bell Curve that lists applications of an earlier version of TETRAD (see section 6 of the review):

Several other applications have been made of the techniques, for example:

  1. Spirtes et al. (1993) used published data on a small observational sample of Spartina grass from the Cape Fear estuary to correctly predict - contrary both to regression results and expert opinion - the outcome of an unpublished greenhouse exp

... (read more)

One possible way to get started is to do what the 'Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data' project did: feed measurements of time and other variables of interest into a computer program which uses a genetic algorithm to build functions that best represent one variable as a function of itself and the other variables. The Science article is paywalled but available elsewhere. (See also this bunch of presentation slides.)

They also have software for you to do this at home.

"Silas, there is no Bayesian ‘revival’ in science. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce science to a mechanical procedure." – Gene Callahan

Am I the only one who finds this extremely unlikely? So far as I know, Bayesian methods have become massively more popular in science over the last 50 years. (Count JSTOR hits for the word 'Bayesian,' for example, and watch the numbers shoot up over time!)

3Douglas_Knight
Half of those hits are in the social sciences. I suspect that is economists defining the rational agents they study as bayesian, but that is rather different from the economists being bayesian themselves! The other half are in math & staticstics is probably that bayesian statisticians are becoming more common, which you might count as science (and 10% are in science proper). Anyhow, it's clear from the context (I'd have thought from the quote) that he just means that the vast majority of scientists are not interested in defining science precisely.

The problem that I hear most often in regard to mechanizing this process has the basic form, "Obviously, you need a human in the loop because of all the cases where you need to be able to recognize that a correlation is spurious, and thus to ignore it, and that comes from having good background knowledge."

Those people should be glad they've never heard of TETRAD - their heads might have exploded!

2NancyLebovitz
That's intriguing. Has it turned out to be useful?
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