Barkley__Rosser

Karma: −19

Barkley__Rosser 27 Mar 2007 18:52 UTC
10 points
on: Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger)
OTOH, there was this accumulation of Talmud, with later commentaries continuing to be added, Mishnah, and on and on. So, one can argue that there was this degradation function as one moves further away from the original source, but this is presumably at least partly offset by the accumulation of the commentaries themselves. Do they accumulate more rapidly than the degradation occurs?

BTW, there is something similar in the debates over the various Islamic law codes, the various Shari’as. An issue is which of the reputed sayings of the Prophet Muhammed, collectively known as the Hadith, are to be accepted as genuine and therefore to serve as part of the foundation of a proper Shari’s (along with the Qur’an and some other things). The validity of a given saying was based on a chain of witnesses: Abdul heard it from Abdullah who heard it from Abu-Bakr who heard the Prophet, and so forth. Part of the argument is that the longer this chain of reputed witnesses is, the less reliably a part of the Hadith the supposed saying is, and indeed, some sayings are accepted in some Shari’as, while the stricter ones rule them out for having overly long chains of witnesses. The strictest of the Sunni Shari’as is the one accepted in Saudi Arabia, the Hanbali, which accepts only the Qur’an and a very small Hadith as bases for the law.

Barkley__Rosser 3 Apr 2007 17:45 UTC
3 points
on: The Majority Is Always Wrong
I think the English measurement story is simply one of path dependence. It is entrenched, lots of people know it, and it would cost a lot in infrastructure and learning to switch, just like the QWERTY keyboard. OTOH, the English language has considerable nuance, given the many languages that go into it.

The Pareto distribution argument is in the right direction. Think of a skewed distribution versus a normal one. So, the mean of the normal one might be higher than that of the skewed one. On average it does better, and hence may be more popular. But the skewed one has this tail that does much better than the normal one a non-trivial amount of the time, so that risk lovers are attracted to it. This is not all that different from the argument about how noise traders survive in financial markets. Most go bankrupt, but those who actually did buy low and sell high do better than anybody else in the market and definitely survive.

Barkley__Rosser 23 Dec 2007 22:10 UTC
2 points
on: Effortless Technique
Raymond Smullyan used to pull dimes out of my ears when I was a kid, no kidding.

My old man, a friend of Smullyan’s (hence his access to my youthful ears), used to argue that a major motivation for mathematicians was “laziness,” a desire to figure out ways to solve problems with less effort.

Barkley__Rosser 20 Dec 2007 22:44 UTC
2 points
on: Guardians of Ayn Rand
David Kelley,

Maybe you were the first to use the terms “open and closed systems” within Objectivist discourse and publications, but to claim that you “coined” them is utter nonsense. They have been in widespread usage within systems theory and related fields for well over a half century in works by such people as von Bertalanffy and Vernadsky, some of this actually going back as far as the 1920s, if not earlier. Please...

Barkley__Rosser 11 Sep 2007 17:38 UTC
2 points
on: The Crackpot Offer
Not sure if this is cranky or not, but when I was youthful I noticed that the Lorentz transformation of space-time due relativistic effects, square root of one minuc v squared over c squared, implies an imaginary solution for an v greater than c, that is for traveling faster than the speed of light. Now, most sci fi stories suggest that one would go backwards in time if one exceeded the speed of light, but I deduced that one would go into a second time dimension.

Of course the problem is that as long as Einstein is right, it is simply impossible to exceed the speed of light, thereby making the entire speculation irrelevant.

Barkley__Rosser 24 Dec 2007 21:28 UTC
0 points
on: Effortless Technique
pdf23ds,

Yes, there is even a stronger motive for computer programmers than for just plain old mathematicians. Real money is involved in shortening those programs.

Regarding Taoism and economics, there has long been a dialectic in Chinese culture and philosophy between Taoism and Confucianism. The former is “the scholar out of power,” opposing state power over the economy and society, practiciy we wei and so on; while the latter is “the scholar in power,” supporting hierarchy and imperial state power over the economy and society in a supposedly harmonius balance.

Barkley__Rosser 7 Nov 2007 18:17 UTC
0 points
on: The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
Eliezer,

Maybe I will get back to you on that point, and maybe I will not. I am about to leave town, and I spend 30 hours a week editing a journal, along with being a full professor of economics. This is why I turned down Robin’s invitation to become a co-blogger here. Too damned busy. This is not meant to be a copout or an escape. I already spent a couple of hours I did not have last night digging through Gould again on your other posting.

I will note that the special issue I edited includes a wide variety of views and that there remain sharply contrasting opinions regarding the bottom line. Interestingly, the hardest line defenders of the Dawkins position (he was invited to participate, as were Tooby and Maynard Smith, although they declined), was a paper by GMU’s Vernon Smith and Dan Houser, two economists. The political scientist, Axelrod, was also defending that view. The mathematical population geneticists were defending multi-level evolution, at least in principle under the right conditions.

For the record, I think you are a smart guy. If I have the time, I shall get into responding to your specific question. But I gotta go now.

Barkley__Rosser 17 Aug 2007 20:59 UTC
0 points
on: Conservation of Expected Evidence
Eliezer,

This is about to scroll off, but, frankly, I do not know what you mean by “normative” in this context. The usual usage of this term implies statements about values or norms. I do not see that anything about this has anything to do with values or norms. Perhaps I do not understand the “wholel point of Bayes’ Theorem.” Then again, I do not see anything in your reply that actually counters the argument I made.

Bottom line: I think your “law” is only true by assumption.

Barkley__Rosser 15 Aug 2007 19:56 UTC
0 points
on: Conservation of Expected Evidence
Eliezer,

I do not necessarily believe that likelihood ratios are fixed for all time. The part of me that is Bayesian tends to the radically subjective form a la Keynes.

Also, I am a fan of nonstandard analysis. So, I have no problem with infinities that are not mere limits.

Barkley__Rosser 14 Aug 2007 20:24 UTC
0 points
on: Conservation of Expected Evidence
Tom,

Bayes’ Theorem has its limits. The support must be continuous, the dimensionality must be finite. Some of the discussion here has raised issues here that could be relevant to these kinds of conditiosn, such as fuzziness about the truth or falsity of H. This is not as straightforward as you claim it is.

Barkley__Rosser 13 Aug 2007 22:06 UTC
0 points
on: Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
I would agree that the lack of sabotage cannot be argued as support for accepting an increase in the probability of the existence of a fifth column. But it may not be sufficient to lower the probability that there is a fifth column, and certainly may not be sufficient to lower a prior of greater than 50% to below 50%, even assuming that one is a Bayesian.

Barkley__Rosser 26 Apr 2007 18:09 UTC
0 points
on: Feeling Rational
This is one of those rare moments where the usually horribly heterodox economist, me, defends orthodox economic theory. So, looked at very closely, orthodox microeconomic says nothing at all about peoples’ preferences themselves, which presumably involve their emotional reactions to various things. What is assumed is certain things about these preferences, that people know what they are, that they exhibit continuity, that they have a degree of internal consistency in the sense of exhibiting transitivity, and it also makes people behave more “rationall” and exhibit continuous demand functions if their utility functions exhibit convexity. So, rationality is not about what your preferences are or the degree to which they are based on one’s emotions. They are that one know what they are, that they have a degree of internal coherence or consistency, and the, the biggie, that people actually act on the basis of their real preferences.

A lot of the problems regarding “irrationality” involve people behaving in internally consistent manners, especially over time. Behavioral economists are now arguing it out whether one should deal with this via multiple personality (or preference systems) models or approaches that stress focusing on “rationality” and keeping mind one’s “real” preferences. Thus, hyperbolic discounting involves “time inconsistency.” I want things now that I shall regret having wanted so much later. I eat the candy bar now and wake up fat later, etc. etc. Is this a combat of two preference systems or just “irrationality,” People like Matthew Rabin who tend to use the latter approch, in fact say that the goal is to have people be “rational,” to know their own real preferences and to act on them. If they really do not mind being fat, then go ahead and eat the candy bar. But in any case, it is perfectly OK either way to have the caring about being fat or not caring about being fat to be based on one’s emotional reactions. One should undertand one’s own emotional reactions. That is rationality.

Barkley__Rosser 12 Apr 2007 17:34 UTC
0 points
on: Priors as Mathematical Objects
Hal,

You are being a bad boy. In his earlier discussion Eliezer made it clear that he did not approve of this terminology of “updating priors.” One has posterior probability distributions. The prior is what one starts with. However, Eliezer has also been a bit confusing with his occasional use of such language as a “prior learning.” I repeat, agents learn, not priors, although in his view of the post-human computerized future, maybe it will be computerized priors that do the learning.

The only way one is going to get “wrong learning” at least somewhat asymptotically is if the dimensionality is high and the support is disconnected. Eliezer is right that if one starts off with a prior that is far enough off, one might well have “wrong learning,” at least for awhile. But, unless the conditions I just listed hold, eventually the learning will move in the right direction and head towards the correct answer, or probability distribution, at least that is what Bayes’ Theorem asserts.

OTOH, the reference to “deep Bayesianism” raises another issue, that of fundamental subjectivism. There is this deep divide among Bayesians between the ones that are ultimately classical frequentists but who argue that Bayesian methods are a superior way of getting to the true objective distribution, and the deep subjectivist Bayesians. For the latter, there are no ultimately “true” probability distributions. We are always estimating something derived out of our subjective priors as updated by more recent information, wherever those priors came from.

Also, saying a prior should the known probability distribution, say of cancer victims, assumes that this probability is somehow known. The prior is always subject to how much information the assumer of a prior has when they being their process of estimation.

Barkley__Rosser 10 Apr 2007 18:14 UTC
0 points
on: “Inductive Bias”
Eliezer,

Ah, so you are a constructivist, perhaps even an intuitionist? Even so, the point of such theorems is that they can happen in a long transient within finite constraints, with the biggie here being the non-connectedness of the support. One can get stuck in a cycle going nowhere for a long time, just as in such phenomena as transient chaos. With a suitably large, but finite, dimensionality and a disconnected support, one can wander in a wilderness with not much serious convergence for a very long time.

I find the idea of a “prior learning” to be a bit weird. It is an agent who learns, although the prior the agent walks in with will certainly play a role in the ability of the agent to learn. But the problem of inertia that I raised has more to do with the nature of agents than with their priors.

Getting to the raison d’etre of this blog, the question here is does bias arise from the nature of the prior an agent brings to a decision or analytical process, or is it something about the open-mindedness or willing to adjust posteriors in the face of evidence that is more important? Presumably both are playing at least some role.

Barkley__Rosser 9 Apr 2007 20:36 UTC
0 points
on: “Inductive Bias”
Eliezer,

Yes, thank you for correcting my sloppy wording.

So, it is the marginal posterior probabilities that exhibit inertia, or slow updating through learning, not the eternally unvarying “priors.”

Barkley__Rosser 4 Apr 2007 21:57 UTC
0 points
on: The Majority Is Always Wrong
knackeredhack,

Forecasting markets in general is a mug’s game, only made worse when bubbles go on. Go read all the debates about the (maybe) housing bubble going on over at Econbrowser. There is a deep argument, which Jim Hamilton has long been one of the main promulgators of, that one can never identify for certain econometrically if one is in a bubble or not, although one may be able to do so pretty much for certain sometimes with closed-end funds, where there is a well-defined fundamental in the net asset value of the fund.

Regarding Sornette, his model is one of a rational stochastically crashing bubble, which requires a sharp upward acceleration to provide risk premia for the rising probability of the inevitable crash. These tend to go to infinity at a certain point, which is the basis for forecasting the crash that Sornette uses. Of course there is plenty of reason to believe that people in bubbles are not fully rational, and therefore it is not surprising that Sornette has had a rather mixed record in his forecasting.

Barkley__Rosser 8 Nov 2007 23:41 UTC
−1 points
on: The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
Eliezer,

So, who is your McCabe?

Wiseman,

Wise crack.

Barkley__Rosser 7 Nov 2007 18:11 UTC
−1 points
on: Beware of Stephen J. Gould
michael vassar,

Yes, but that “common sense” was widely ignored by most evolutionary theorists before Gould pointed it out. His approach is now in all the textbooks. He has also emphasized against some of his less fair critics that his original papers on this were specifically addressed to the paleontologists.

Another part of it, not so obvious and definitely not part of the general lexicon, is the idea of long periods of stasis. This was a point not at all emphasized by anybody prior to Eldredge and Gould, and was the real core of the original aspect of it.

So, what are the top ten ideas of the last half century ahead of it and where are they in the textbooks?

Regarding Darwin, the picture is muddled in that his remarks that look open to p.e. appear in later edtions of Origin of the Species, but not in the first one, where a more hardline gradualist scenario is presented.

Barkley__Rosser 14 Aug 2007 20:27 UTC
−1 points
on: Conservation of Expected Evidence
Furthermore, I remind one and all that Bayes’ Theorem is asymptotic. Even if the conditions hold, the “true” probability is approached only in the infinite time horizon. This could occur so slowly that it might stay on the “wrong” side of 50% well past the time that any finite viewer might hang around to watch.

There is also the black swan problem. It could move in the wrong direction until the black swan datum finally shows up pushing it in the other direction, which, again, may not occur during the time period someone is observing. This black swan question is exactly the frame of discussion here, as it is Taleb who has gone on and on about this business about evidence and absence thereof.

Barkley__Rosser 6 Nov 2007 19:48 UTC
−3 points
on: Beware of Stephen J. Gould
Eliezer,

You are in way over your head on this one. It is clear that you are behind on current literature. The “selfish gene” is old hat and out of date. Multi-level evolution is increasingly widely accepted by many geneticists, with such mechanisms as reciprocal altruism being keys. The equations for when the Williams argument on this matter breaks down have been around since James F. Crow first put them out back in 1953, although they were re-codfied and more widely distributed in the 1970s as the Hamilton-Price equations.

I am in my office where I do not have copies of the relevant books, and I never read the one by Gould that has you most worked up. It may well be that Gould claims excessive credit for ideas that were due to Williams in it. I do not know. I do know that while they disagreed on various things, Gould certainly does cite Williams in other places and writings and clearly recognized his role in various matters, at least in other places, if not in this particular book. There is little doubt that you are wildly exaggerating his sins in this particular matter.

Also, while one can find the idea of a variable rate of evolution in Darwin, there is no doubt that he saw evolution as fundamentally continuous and extremely gradual. “Nature non facit saltum” is the frontispiece for all editions of his Origin of Species, which comes ultimately from Leibniz. The guy you linked to dismisses Gould’s (and Eldredge’s) idea of “punctuated equilibrium” as already known to Darwin and thus derivative. Excuse me, but this is horse manure. Gould and Eldredge may have overstated the case, but they completely altered the discourse, and the awareness of the possibility of much more rapid evolution is now much more widely accepted.

Indeed, these ideas are linked, as I suspect you know. The possibility of more rapid evolution is indeed tied up with the idea of multi-level evolution, if only partially. It is indeed a “hardline, fundamentalist Darwinian” position that denies this, as it has been by Dawkins (and Williams earlier).