challenge someone to put up or shut up.
That is exactly right. Challenging someone to put up or shut up is a confrontation and an escalation. That is how fistfights begin. The challenge is construed as being to their honor.
A well-written analysis of the dynamic is given by a lawyer, William Ian Miller, in Humiliation. Among the other interesting tales he tells is how a medieval Icelandic noble family feud began with a too extravagant gift.
Can you imagine Angela Merkel or Margaret Thatcher or even Sarah Palin doing that? Offering to bet a lot of money on the issue in the middle of a debate is hyper-masculine, aggressive, and low class. It is not all that different from asking the guy if he wants to step outside.
Prediction markets where the other side of the bet is a faceless horde are completely different. There is no humiliation inflicted.
Intriguingly, even though the sample size increased by more than 6 times, most of these results are within one to two percent of the numbers on the 2009 survey, so this supports taking them as a direct line to prevailing rationalist opinion rather than the contingent opinions of one random group.
This is not just intriguing. To me this is the single most significant finding in the survey.
Eagerly anticipating your analysis and the subsequent discussion.
Thanks again!
Kahneman gave a talk at Google about how and why intuition works well for us on 10 November. I am about halfway through it and so far it is marvelous.
edit The same talk (very close) at Edge transcribed plus discussion after with Cosmides and Tooby and Pinker. Link to transcript.
The last time I looked at prediction book the allowed values were integers 0 − 100 which makes it impossible to really use it for this. Here the meaningful values are is it .00001 or is it .0000000001?
I liked this fellow’s take.
I concur that the Ann/Bob/Carol question is more taxing than the Cognitive Reflection Test.
In fact I can prove for my own case sample size N = 1. I scored 3⁄3 on the CRT and I missed Ann/Bob/Carol as I did not look at Bob as being unambiguously either married or unmarried and shot myself in my own damn foot on the sucker.
Also, that Ann/Bob/Carol question snagged a bunch of people. We have a lot of work to do.
5 tabs. Three of them are related to the Akrasia poll and I will be closing them within 5 minutes. I do not like large numbers of open tabs.
This quotation from a failed Nature collaborative project from Nielsen’s website leaped out to me:
“A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments. ”
Many of the folks here have pet projects where they imagine easy pickings out there and they wonder why nobody is much interested in pursuing them and free software and open source software look like good analogs for making progress on a wide number of subjects. How to make this happen is a great question and I can only encourage Nielsen but I do not put a high probability on finding any simple solutions. Sharing is hard to do without trust, and trust is hard to build across the ether.
I will share with you my own pet idea that could potentially be researched in such a manner to great benefit for humans if not great profit for Silicon Valley entrepeneurs. Garlic. There are a plethora of anecdotes that eating a bunch of garlic is great for your health. Doing a rigorous study that is worthy of submission to New England Journal of Medicine or similar costs a lot of money and there is a lot more money in atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants and other chemicals which a company can patent; the incentives for medical and biology and biochemistry researchers are completely lined up to ignore garlic. There have been a couple of studies (the current wikipedia article on garlic looks pretty good to me) but dependable science looks to me like it may well never get here, short of something like Nielsen advocates: thousands of collaborative networked individuals all pitching in a little piece.
This makes me sad on the one hand. When I eat a couple of cloves of garlic there is an obvious and significant effect. It is as if my muscles and my blood are mildly drunk while my brain and reflexes remain completely sober. I want some more certain knowledge about what is going on here and I am not hopeful that I will ever find it. On the other hand there is an opportunity here, and many other similar opportunities in a wild variety of areas, just like Nielsen is writing and talking about. In theory I agree with him totally. What will come of his vision and those of similarly minded folk remains to be seen.
My own view is that the sole difference between the two is that science commands you to suspend judgment until the null hypothesis is under p=0.05, at least for the purposes of what is allowed into the scientific canon as provisional fact, and Bayesians are more comfortable making bets with greater degrees of uncertainty.
Are you familiar with Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge?
His view is only slightly more strict, yet he arrives at some very different conclusions. For example, under your framework Rhine’s ESP experiments are scientific hypothesis tests, and under his they are illogical. I am not convinced by Polanyi, but it is far from clear to me how you could show he is wrong. If you know how to show he is wrong and could explain that in a couple paragraphs (or point me to such a document) I would be very interested in reading it.
It is slang but the convention is “underwater”.
P(infinite x,y,z) ~ .00001
P(substantial improvement) ~ .2 P(sound investment) ~ .8 P(rationaltopia) ~ .01
P(simulation) ~ .01 P(other minds) ~ .9999 P(dreaming) ~ .0001
My wild ass guess is one month.
I base this number on marijuana testing supposedly useless after a month. It does work very well for two weeks though because some byproduct is fat soluble and is absorbed by your fat cells where it takes them up to a month to completely rinse out. So, for example if you were eating a lot of high hormone ranch animal meat there may well be junk in there that takes your system a month to completely purge it out after you stop eating the high hormone ranch animal meat and you would not be able to see the effects undiluted for a month. Also this is the time granule I use for my own diet self-experiments which I seem to never get to the end of. My diets are for fitness and health purposes only as I have never been much over- or underweight.
I took your survey. There may be small errors in a couple of my answers. I can hardly wait to see your explanation of what you are doing with those “calibration questions” like “what is your estimate of the probability that your answer to Newton’s Principia publication date is within 15 years of the correct answer”?
Also if there is some sort of sampling theory surveying practice FAQ that explains the use of such questions I would be interested in reading it.
Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
(from the Voltaire wiki quote page)
The canonical work on the subject of drugs and artistic creativity may be the three volume set by Dale Pendell:
Pharmako/ Poeia Pharmako/Dynamis Pharmako/Gnosis.
The most relevant point in all three books is that great modern writers in the English language are very often alcoholics. He says on page 78 of Pharmako / Poeia:
“Opium was the drug of choice for the romantics, but for the moderns, the poets and writers of the first half or two-thirds of the twentieth century, the overwhelming preferred poison was alcohol. Donald W. Goodwin, in Alcohol and the Writer, writes: ‘six Americans had won the Nobel Prize in literature and four were alcoholic. (A fifth drank heavily and the sixth was Pearl Buck, who probably didn’t deserve the prize.)’ Goodwin concludes that, as a vocation, writers are over-represented in the population of alcohol addicts. Sinclair Lewis, an alcoholic himself, once quipped: ‘Can you name five American writers since Poe who did not die of alcoholism?’ Certainly enough of a problem that, for a writer alcoholism should be considered an occupational hazard.”
Very nicely done.
For emphasis I cut and paste the following:
This repetition of “at the margin” or “on the margin” and even calling his blog Marginal Revolution may be the biggest thing about Cowen’s writing which really hooks me.
And now some narrative. In the beginning the story was a memory device. There were bards and storytellers before we had writing and their greatest power may be as mnemonic. I have forgotten where I saw this—it may have been in a largely bogus pop psychology book—but one story about stories I have always liked goes something like: when telling a fairy tale to a child, they will never permit you to alter or leave out any important detail. So say you are telling Cinderella; in that case you cannot leave out the part about the abusive stepmother and stepsisters, or the child immediately goes bonkers.
I have no idea if that is true or not but it certainly is memorable.
OK one more and then I will stop. I took a community police class a couple years ago. Three hours, one night a week, ten weeks. Really interesting. It was free and if you have one in your town I highly recommend going for it. One of the things in the class was the pedophile detective explaining how you do an interrogation to catch a suspect in a lie. He said the trick (and it’s really easy) is you get him to retell his story starting over again in the middle. He claimed the guys have their story memorized A, B, C, D, E, . . . X, Y, Z. But, if you say: OK begin at F and start over; or, if you ask: now did M happen before O or did O happen first? They always had to go back to A and start over again in their mind from the beginning of their story and that 40 second or 80 second or whatever delay while they were working down from A was the tell.
I have no idea if that is true or not either but it certainly is memorable for me.