Why do this post get so many down votes? The topic isn’t really about Charlie Hebdo. I could have used any other example in which emotionally strong counter theories has arisen.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
and
It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can’t rely on prior reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
look like a significant misunderstanding of what the bayesian approach is.
I do not know the answer to you question. Here is my best guess after a couple minutes of trying to answer the question.
Short answer: Bayesianism is not about priors, it is about how evidence should change priors.
The Bayesian approach is all about evidence. Bayesian probability theory is the math of evidence. It needs a prior to work, because evidence is all about how much beliefs should change, so you need a prior to change. You could also do a lot of the Bayesian analysis without choosing a prior, and just write it down as “how much your beliefs would change.” (but this doesn’t end up with answers that are single numbers)
Seriously, if you define evidence as “something that sways your beliefs because it is more likely to happen under one hypothesis than the alternative hypothesis,” then Bayesianism is the math of evidence, and frequentism (which is used in “Real science”) is not. (and does not even really try to be)
Also, most of the people here would agree that if they do not have sufficient evidence, then they should still assign a probability, and you should be very quick to change it as you get evidence. This last claim might be controversial here, because people might have alternate hacks where they don’t do this to avoid bias, but they will agree that if they could trust themselves, they would want to do this.
Seriously, if you define evidence as “something that sways your beliefs because it is more likely to happen under one hypothesis than the alternative hypothesis,” then Bayesianism is the math of evidence, and frequentism (which is used in “Real science”) is not. (and does not even really try to be)
This looks seriously misleading to me. While it may be technically correct (because neither frequentism nor “Real science” care much about swaying your beliefs), the math of deciding what’s “more likely to happen under one hypothesis than the alternative hypothesis” is a standard part of frequentist statistics where it goes by the name of maximum likelihood.
I downvoted because if you’re going to try to practice rationality or hone your understanding of your own biases, emotionally charged current events are a very bad domain to play around in. It’s like trying to learn the basics of Newtonian physics by studying Theo Jansen’s sculptures. There’s a giant tangle of stupid-inducing factors in this case, and a well chosen toy problem would be able to address the same subject without being likely to inadvertently flip those switches.
I disagree. Emotionally charged events tend to be both important, AND the ones in which rationality is most trampled. All who aspire to be less wrong in a meaningful way will benefit from sorting out the things that bias reasoning about emotionally charged current events.
It is important to be rational in such cases. But ‘situations where rationality is important’ isn’t the same set as ‘situations that are good didactic tools for rationality’. I mean, this is basically the central point of Politics is the Mind Killer: “What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question?”
Charlie Hebdo wasn’t brought up as the topic, it was brought up as an example of a system that could have been demonstrated with a lot less baggage.
The actual discussion here in this thread does not seem to me to have suffered from the relevancy and poignancy of its subject. Do you see it differently, or are you just speaking in generalities that don’t turn out to be true in this case?
I just did a quick review of the entire thread and I would say this post and it s comments helped me reason better about recent emotionally charged events. Among other things:
1) That the Turkish president goes public with the theory that it was Mossad tells me how “mainstream” in what I might call median-rational Muslim countries is a wrong interpretation designed to protect Muslims from what other Muslims are doing in their name.
2) This thread reinforces my belief that staying away from discussions of emotionally charged recent news makes as much sense as not discussing controversial interpretations of quantum mechanics. I look at this discussion and think that things that are emotionally charged are generally quite important, and that it is important to understand them. That the point of learning how to be “lesswrong” includes being less wrong about things we get all heated up about. That, essentially, the idea that tabooing discussion of things that are emotionally charged is a way of tabooing a valuable part of learning to be less wrong .
Great idea asking this question a few weeks after the heat has died down.
What do you think of my conclusions? Is it important to learn how to be less wrong when people are so emotionally involved that their emotions drive them to distortion? Is doing “case studies” like this discussion a way to get there?
staying away from discussions of emotionally charged recent news
That’s a strawman. Nobody argued here that it’s bad to discuss recent news in general.
That, essentially, the idea that tabooing discussion of things that are emotionally charged is a way of tabooing a valuable part of learning to be less wrong .
That’s not what “politics is the mindkiller” advocates. It advocates not using emotionally charged examples to make points that you could make with examples that are less emotionally charged.
If the OP wanted to specifically talk about the issue of the attacks and reasons to think that the official version of this specific event isn’t correct he could have made a threat making an argument why the official story is wrong.
He didn’t. He used it as an example for a larger class of events.
If he wanted to speak about the value in believing conspiracy theories he could have analysed a case like Princes Diana’s death and the reasons for >0.01% believe that she was killed on purpose. The event happened years ago, so the evidence base is a lot better. There are interesting things to be said given how that case progressed.
A case study that likely wouldn’t use the term “real science”.
The implicit rule might be that you can work on getting your not-quite-there-yet stuff into being better, or you can talk about contemporary politics, but not both at the same time. Talking about contemporary politics when you don’t have your stuff seriously solid and interesting already is pulling towards the bottomless sinkhole of low-quality politics discussion which there’s an explicit community norm against.
(Yes, doing the stuff well right from the outset can actually be pretty hard. That’s why the simpler version of rule is “no contemporary politics talk”.)
I could have used any other example in which emotionally strong counter theories has arisen.
I haven’t seen any such theories, and when I specifically searched them out, I found nothing worth paying attention to. Clearly, we are accessing different news sources. Personally, I don’t pay much attention to the news, and what little I hear is from the BBC, occasionally the better class of UK newspapers, and I’ll look on Google News if there’s something I specifically want to find news about.
Where do you find the news?
Real science works by investigating evidence.
On the Hebdo attack, there is plenty of evidence. The identities of the individual attackers are known. The manner of their attack suggests military experience. It is not yet clear what Islamic organisation they belonged to, if any, but no other type of organisation is suggested, and I think none needs to be. No-one is suggesting that this was anything but an Islamic terrorist attack, which it seems obvious to me that it was. Think horses, not zebras.
To find any conspiracy theories at all I had to specifically search for /hebdo conspiracy/ and only turned up stuff clearly not worth paying attention to, not even zebras, but unicorns.
Choosing a event that happened in the last months to make the point is stupid if you care about rational discussion as Eliezer layed out in “Politics is the Mindkiller”.
You also said little of substance. You didn’t make value of information calculations or argued why one should expect that further investigation of this issue would change one’s opinion.
Why do this post get so many down votes? The topic isn’t really about Charlie Hebdo. I could have used any other example in which emotionally strong counter theories has arisen.
My guess is that it is because
and
look like a significant misunderstanding of what the bayesian approach is.
So, what doc on the web would most concisely rid me of exactly my misunderstanding?
I do not know the answer to you question. Here is my best guess after a couple minutes of trying to answer the question.
Short answer: Bayesianism is not about priors, it is about how evidence should change priors.
The Bayesian approach is all about evidence. Bayesian probability theory is the math of evidence. It needs a prior to work, because evidence is all about how much beliefs should change, so you need a prior to change. You could also do a lot of the Bayesian analysis without choosing a prior, and just write it down as “how much your beliefs would change.” (but this doesn’t end up with answers that are single numbers)
Seriously, if you define evidence as “something that sways your beliefs because it is more likely to happen under one hypothesis than the alternative hypothesis,” then Bayesianism is the math of evidence, and frequentism (which is used in “Real science”) is not. (and does not even really try to be)
Also, most of the people here would agree that if they do not have sufficient evidence, then they should still assign a probability, and you should be very quick to change it as you get evidence. This last claim might be controversial here, because people might have alternate hacks where they don’t do this to avoid bias, but they will agree that if they could trust themselves, they would want to do this.
This looks seriously misleading to me. While it may be technically correct (because neither frequentism nor “Real science” care much about swaying your beliefs), the math of deciding what’s “more likely to happen under one hypothesis than the alternative hypothesis” is a standard part of frequentist statistics where it goes by the name of maximum likelihood.
You might also be interested in the concept of Fisher information.
I agree with you criticism. Thank you.
I downvoted because if you’re going to try to practice rationality or hone your understanding of your own biases, emotionally charged current events are a very bad domain to play around in. It’s like trying to learn the basics of Newtonian physics by studying Theo Jansen’s sculptures. There’s a giant tangle of stupid-inducing factors in this case, and a well chosen toy problem would be able to address the same subject without being likely to inadvertently flip those switches.
I disagree. Emotionally charged events tend to be both important, AND the ones in which rationality is most trampled. All who aspire to be less wrong in a meaningful way will benefit from sorting out the things that bias reasoning about emotionally charged current events.
It is important to be rational in such cases. But ‘situations where rationality is important’ isn’t the same set as ‘situations that are good didactic tools for rationality’. I mean, this is basically the central point of Politics is the Mind Killer: “What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question?”
Charlie Hebdo wasn’t brought up as the topic, it was brought up as an example of a system that could have been demonstrated with a lot less baggage.
The actual discussion here in this thread does not seem to me to have suffered from the relevancy and poignancy of its subject. Do you see it differently, or are you just speaking in generalities that don’t turn out to be true in this case?
Do you think the discussion in this thread produced interesting new insight for you, that in general help you reason better about political issues?
I just did a quick review of the entire thread and I would say this post and it s comments helped me reason better about recent emotionally charged events. Among other things:
1) That the Turkish president goes public with the theory that it was Mossad tells me how “mainstream” in what I might call median-rational Muslim countries is a wrong interpretation designed to protect Muslims from what other Muslims are doing in their name.
2) This thread reinforces my belief that staying away from discussions of emotionally charged recent news makes as much sense as not discussing controversial interpretations of quantum mechanics. I look at this discussion and think that things that are emotionally charged are generally quite important, and that it is important to understand them. That the point of learning how to be “lesswrong” includes being less wrong about things we get all heated up about. That, essentially, the idea that tabooing discussion of things that are emotionally charged is a way of tabooing a valuable part of learning to be less wrong .
Great idea asking this question a few weeks after the heat has died down.
What do you think of my conclusions? Is it important to learn how to be less wrong when people are so emotionally involved that their emotions drive them to distortion? Is doing “case studies” like this discussion a way to get there?
I think they are correct.
That’s a strawman. Nobody argued here that it’s bad to discuss recent news in general.
That’s not what “politics is the mindkiller” advocates. It advocates not using emotionally charged examples to make points that you could make with examples that are less emotionally charged.
If the OP wanted to specifically talk about the issue of the attacks and reasons to think that the official version of this specific event isn’t correct he could have made a threat making an argument why the official story is wrong.
He didn’t. He used it as an example for a larger class of events.
If he wanted to speak about the value in believing conspiracy theories he could have analysed a case like Princes Diana’s death and the reasons for >0.01% believe that she was killed on purpose. The event happened years ago, so the evidence base is a lot better. There are interesting things to be said given how that case progressed. A case study that likely wouldn’t use the term “real science”.
yes, it’s a kind of exercise challenge to think rationally on the hot topics.
Because if you are skeptical and agnostic about absolutely everything then you will get nothing done.
The implicit rule might be that you can work on getting your not-quite-there-yet stuff into being better, or you can talk about contemporary politics, but not both at the same time. Talking about contemporary politics when you don’t have your stuff seriously solid and interesting already is pulling towards the bottomless sinkhole of low-quality politics discussion which there’s an explicit community norm against.
(Yes, doing the stuff well right from the outset can actually be pretty hard. That’s why the simpler version of rule is “no contemporary politics talk”.)
I haven’t seen any such theories, and when I specifically searched them out, I found nothing worth paying attention to. Clearly, we are accessing different news sources. Personally, I don’t pay much attention to the news, and what little I hear is from the BBC, occasionally the better class of UK newspapers, and I’ll look on Google News if there’s something I specifically want to find news about.
Where do you find the news?
On the Hebdo attack, there is plenty of evidence. The identities of the individual attackers are known. The manner of their attack suggests military experience. It is not yet clear what Islamic organisation they belonged to, if any, but no other type of organisation is suggested, and I think none needs to be. No-one is suggesting that this was anything but an Islamic terrorist attack, which it seems obvious to me that it was. Think horses, not zebras.
To find any conspiracy theories at all I had to specifically search for /hebdo conspiracy/ and only turned up stuff clearly not worth paying attention to, not even zebras, but unicorns.
See for example “Turkish president accuses ‘the West’ of being behind Charlie Hebdo attacks and deliberately ‘blaming Muslims’ reported in the UK’s Daily Mail. It took me a few seconds to find this example there are many others.
Choosing a event that happened in the last months to make the point is stupid if you care about rational discussion as Eliezer layed out in “Politics is the Mindkiller”.
You also said little of substance. You didn’t make value of information calculations or argued why one should expect that further investigation of this issue would change one’s opinion.
Because it seemed like it was arguing for taking conspiracy theories seriously without even trying to present evidence?