All of panickedapricott's Comments + Replies

If I believed this to be true I think I would take your position. But because you would not change your mind if you believed this was false I too, do not believe this counts as the crux of our disagreement.

I'll give it a shot this time. My proposed crux is that much of what we believe about the causes of poverty (crime... ect. ) are likely false in such a way that we are completely missing something conceptual in our models (including the one you stated above) or the causes are more powerful than our greatest operational intitutions can influence. (Age, genetics, ect)

Doesn't this only work if the logic of the situation is transparent? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by the logic of the situation. Are you trying to say "Keep in mind the counterfactual situations in which you might make various decisions and then determine which situation you are in?"

Or maybe "determine your policy in all statistically likely scenarios then determine which scenario you are in"

2abramdemski
It certainly only works to the extent that the logic of the situation is transparent. What I'm suggesting is that, in practice, it seems like humans can gain a lot by asking themselves what sort of situation they are in and what sort of response would be best to that class of situations (rather than trying to pin down the exact situation they're in and respond in the way that is best for that). This is somewhat odd. It may feel a bit like throwing away information. However, people tend to over-fit the details of a situation (overestimating the value they can get by attending to those details). And, deciding what policies you'd like to implement in general rather than special-casing helps you coordinate with yourself in important ways. (And with others.)

On your first point. If better is defined as affect on crime, dependency, poverty, and mental-illness I would expect NO to "negligible" difference between the two. It's a minor disagreement I guess.

On your second point. I feel like the answer to this question is subjective and depends largely on how much someone values the future. I'm pretty optimistic about it so I think it's worth the 0.05% chance it would give me as opposed.

2SilentCal
I don't consider the second point a disagreement, since we're both sort of ambivalent. I'm pretty sure there are people who would think I'm unambiguously wrong not to be signed up, and they're who I was looking for. On the first point--this actually seems substantial, maybe worth pursuing. I think initial-distribution measures carry a substantial risk of backfiring and making the poor poorer, while redistribution does not--seems hard to expect the same results if this is the case. This isn't necessarily a crux for me, but I'll hear more about your position before I try to find a proper DC.

There isn't much of a difference between Frequentist statistics and Bayesian statistics.

Statistics Question here.
In a binomial distribution why is it useful to check if N * phat > 5 AND N * (1 - phat) > 5 when determining if it is a normal distribution?
where:

N = number of samples
phat = number of successes / N

I've never been a big user of Wikipedia.