Yes—if not heretical, at least interesting to other people! I’m going to lean into the “blogging about things that seem obvious to me” thing now.
Aaron Bergman
Karma: 841
Fair enough, this might be a good counterargument though I’m very unsure. How much do mundane “brain workouts” matter? Tentatively, the lack of efficacy of brain training programs like Luminosity would suggest that they might not be doing much.
For God’s sake, Google it.
The if long COVID usually clears up after eight weeks, that would definitely weaken my point (which would be good news!) I haven’t decided if it would change my overall stance on masking though
Good point. Implicitly, I was thinking “wearing masks while indoors within ~10 feet of another person or outdoors if packed together like at a rally or concert”
I think so, thanks!
Delta variant: we should probably be re-masking
Good idea, think I will.
I’ve been wondering the exact same thing, thanks for asking.
Thanks!
Would you be willing to post this as a general post on the main forum? I think lots of people including myself would appreciate!
Thanks, but I have hardly any experience with Python. Need to start learning.
Yup, fixing. Gotta get better at proofreading.
From my perspective, this is why society at large needs to get better at communicating the content—so you wouldn’t have to be good at “anticipating the content.”
The meaningfulness point is interesting, but I’m not sure I fully agree. Some topics can me meaningful but not interesting (high frequency trading to donate money) and visa-versa (video game design? No offense to video game designers).
The topic is not the content
By your description, it feels like the kind of book where an author picks a word and then rambles about it like an impromptu speaker. If this had an extraordinary thesis requiring extraordinary evidence like Manufacturing Consent then lots of anecdotes would make sense. But the thesis seems too vague to be extraordinary.
I get the impression of the kind of book which where a dense blogpost is stretched out to the length of a book. This is ironic for a book about subtraction.
Yup, very well-put.
Your point about anecdotes got me thinking; an “extraordinary thesis” might be conceptualized as claiming that the distribution of data significantly shifted away from some “obvious” average. If so, showing the existence of a few data points greater than, say, 4 standard deviations from the “obvious” average actually can be strong evidence in its favor. However, the same is not true for a few examples ~2 standard deviations away. Maybe Klotz’s error is using anecdotes that aren’t far enough away from what intuitively makes sense.
Probably didn’t explain that very well, so here is a Tweet from Spencer Greenberg making the point:
1. By Bayes Factor: suppose hypothesis “A” says a data point is nearly impossible, and hypothesis “B” says the data point is quite likely. Then the existence of that one data point (by Bayes’ rule) should move you substantially toward believing hypothesis B (relative to A).
Example: you have had a rash on your arm for 10 years (with no variability). You buy some “rash cream” off of a shady website, and within 2 hours of applying it, the rash is gone. You can be confident the cream works because it’s otherwise highly unlikely for the rash to vanish.
Book review: Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less
Looks like I’m in good company!
Interesting, but I think you’re way at the tail end of the distribution on this one. I bet I use Google more than 90%+ of people, but still not as much as I should.