I recently stumbled on this realization, when I was talking with friends about the myriad of problems, inconsistencies, and annoyances of the Star Wars universe. After the umteenth conflict was brought up, agreed upon, then given a plausible-sounding explanation, I was a little bit shocked at how amazingly easy Lucas’ Advocacy came to me. It wasn’t a big extrapolation to see that Devil’s Advocacy was nearly as easy.
I think I’ve come to enjoy role playing games less since stumbling upon Less Wrong. Aside from being a communal activity, I find diminished value in obsessing over a map that is only as detailed as the players and DM construct. Maybe if the other players were as interested in models of reality as me it would be different. But in a game where you just Use The Force to fix all problems, clever tricks are largely unrewarded and thus unsatisfying.
Far more interesting to try and figure out this Bayes stuff. For instance, I saw the results of a study in a newscientist article. The article claimed that of 108 women, 75 claimed to have intuitive knowledge of their baby’s sex, and of them, 60% were correct. I was trying to figure out the probability of a woman being intuitive, given that she was correct. It was a failure, since they did not say how correct the women who did not have intuitions were. But it was fun, and deeply satisfying to apply knowledge to a problem. I just realized the article linked to some press release, which seems like a bunch of woowoo. Now I really want to know how accurate the women who didn’t profess magical intuition dream powers were.
I find roleplaying even more satisfying after finding LW! It’s all in how you play though, lately my group and I have gone more and more freeform, bored with all the inconsistent and arbitrary rules much like what you are expressing, but don’t let the rules stop you! if you want a more complex game than the system allows for, drop the system, not the game!
Boy howdy would I like to join your group! I’ve got one game that’s rather similar, and I still love playing that one. Luckily, all the others have run out of steam, so I don’t have to pretend to be satisfied with arbitrary judgments for social reasons. But you’re right, this is pretty off-topic.
Foremost is curiosity. I’ve only really known anything about Bayes Theorem for a month or so, and equipped with this hammer I’ve been looking for nails.
I was also interested in trying to determine just how remarkable this insight power might be and thought that figuring out the posterior probability would give me some insight there. From what I can tell, the number of women who claim intuition so outnumber those who don’t that even if the accuracy in question were 100%, there’d still be a ~58% chance that a woman who has guessed correctly claims special knowledge. So I guess at best I’d know that most people who guess the right answer believe they have special powers.
Strange, it seems my desire to know their accuracy has little to do with my desire to figure out the posterior probability.
I recently stumbled on this realization, when I was talking with friends about the myriad of problems, inconsistencies, and annoyances of the Star Wars universe. After the umteenth conflict was brought up, agreed upon, then given a plausible-sounding explanation, I was a little bit shocked at how amazingly easy Lucas’ Advocacy came to me. It wasn’t a big extrapolation to see that Devil’s Advocacy was nearly as easy.
I think I’ve come to enjoy role playing games less since stumbling upon Less Wrong. Aside from being a communal activity, I find diminished value in obsessing over a map that is only as detailed as the players and DM construct. Maybe if the other players were as interested in models of reality as me it would be different. But in a game where you just Use The Force to fix all problems, clever tricks are largely unrewarded and thus unsatisfying.
Far more interesting to try and figure out this Bayes stuff. For instance, I saw the results of a study in a newscientist article. The article claimed that of 108 women, 75 claimed to have intuitive knowledge of their baby’s sex, and of them, 60% were correct. I was trying to figure out the probability of a woman being intuitive, given that she was correct. It was a failure, since they did not say how correct the women who did not have intuitions were. But it was fun, and deeply satisfying to apply knowledge to a problem. I just realized the article linked to some press release, which seems like a bunch of woowoo. Now I really want to know how accurate the women who didn’t profess magical intuition dream powers were.
I find roleplaying even more satisfying after finding LW! It’s all in how you play though, lately my group and I have gone more and more freeform, bored with all the inconsistent and arbitrary rules much like what you are expressing, but don’t let the rules stop you! if you want a more complex game than the system allows for, drop the system, not the game!
This is seriously of-topic though...
Boy howdy would I like to join your group! I’ve got one game that’s rather similar, and I still love playing that one. Luckily, all the others have run out of steam, so I don’t have to pretend to be satisfied with arbitrary judgments for social reasons. But you’re right, this is pretty off-topic.
In a few sentences, can you explain why you would like to know? What would you know if accuracy was low/high/exactly 50%?
Foremost is curiosity. I’ve only really known anything about Bayes Theorem for a month or so, and equipped with this hammer I’ve been looking for nails.
I was also interested in trying to determine just how remarkable this insight power might be and thought that figuring out the posterior probability would give me some insight there. From what I can tell, the number of women who claim intuition so outnumber those who don’t that even if the accuracy in question were 100%, there’d still be a ~58% chance that a woman who has guessed correctly claims special knowledge. So I guess at best I’d know that most people who guess the right answer believe they have special powers.
Strange, it seems my desire to know their accuracy has little to do with my desire to figure out the posterior probability.