CTVKenney

Karma: 59

CTVKenney 16 Mar 2021 1:12 UTC
12 points
on: What’s So Bad About Ad-Hoc Mathematical Definitions?
The VARIANCE of a random variable seems like one of those ad hoc metrics. I would be very happy for someone to come along and explain why I’m wrong on this. If you want to measure, as Wikipedia says, “how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value,” why use E[ (X—mean)^2 ] instead of E[ |X—mean| ], or more generally E[ |X—mean|^p ]? The best answer I know of is that E[ (X—mean)^2 ] is easier to calculate than those other ones.

CTVKenney 21 Feb 2021 14:29 UTC
3 points
on: What Money Cannot Buy
Money should be able to guarantee that, over several periods of play, you perform not-too-much-worse than an actual expert. Here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15859-f11/www/notes/lecture16.pdf is a paper about an idealized CS-version of this problem.

CTVKenney 28 Jan 2021 23:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Jeffrey Ladish’s comment on: How likely is it that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory?
With regard to the rootclaim link, I agree that it would be good to try to adapt what they’ve done to our own beliefs. However, I want to urge some caution with regard to the actual calculation shown on that website. The event to which they give a whopping 81% probability, “the virus was developed during gain-of-function research and was released by accident,” is a conjunction of two independent theses. We have to be very cautious about such statements, as pointed out in the Rationality A-Z, here https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5g5TkQTe9rmPS5vvM/p/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ

CTVKenney 26 Jan 2021 14:45 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lantalia’s comment on: How likely is it that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory?
I mean to include all the alternatives that involve the virus passing through a laboratory before spreading to humans; so all the options you list are included. There’s nothing wrong with asking about the probability of a composite event.