I wonder if this counts as evidence for my heuristic of judging how seriously to take someone’s belief on a complicated scientific subject by looking to see if they get the right answer on easier scientific questions.
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It might well have been clear from the quote itself, but not to me—I just read the quote as saying Bayesian thinking and Bayesian methods haven’t become more popular in science, which doesn’t mesh with my intuition/experience.
I don’t know of a way to get superscripts with Markdown markup, but if you pull up your Windows Character Map (or your operating system’s equivalent), there should be superscript 1 and 2 characters to paste in.
I’d have expected that men would lie about having more partners rather than fewer, but that might be mere stereotyping on my part.
Or maybe the sample’s not representative of most men—the sample was of Midwestern psychology undergraduate students.
It’s apparently been put to use with some success. Clark Glymour—a philosophy professor who helped develop TETRAD—wrote a long review of The Bell Curve that lists applications of an earlier version of TETRAD (see section 6 of the review):
Several other applications have been made of the techniques, for example:
Spirtes et al. (1993) used published data on a small observational sample of Spartina grass from the Cape Fear estuary to correctly predict—contrary both to regression results and expert opinion—the outcome of an unpublished greenhouse experiment on the influence of salinity, pH and aeration on growth.
Druzdzel and Glymour (1994) used data from the US News and World Report survey of American colleges and universities to predict the effect on dropout rates of manipulating average SAT scores of freshman classes. The prediction was confirmed at Carnegie Mellon University.
Waldemark used the techniques to recalibrate a mass spectrometer aboard a Swedish satellite, reducing errors by half.
Shipley (1995, 1997, in review) used the techniques to model a variety of biological problems, and developed adaptations of them for small sample problems.
Akleman et al. (1997) have found that the graphical model search techniques do as well or better than standard time series regression techniques based on statistical loss functions at out of sample predictions for data on exchange rates and corn prices.
Personally I find it a little odd that such a useful tool is still so obscure, but I guess a lot of scientists are loath to change tools and techniques.
One possible way to get started is to do what the ‘Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data’ project did: feed measurements of time and other variables of interest into a computer program which uses a genetic algorithm to build functions that best represent one variable as a function of itself and the other variables. The Science article is paywalled but available elsewhere. (See also this bunch of presentation slides.)
They also have software for you to do this at home.
“Silas, there is no Bayesian ‘revival’ in science. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce science to a mechanical procedure.” – Gene Callahan
Am I the only one who finds this extremely unlikely? So far as I know, Bayesian methods have become massively more popular in science over the last 50 years. (Count JSTOR hits for the word ‘Bayesian,’ for example, and watch the numbers shoot up over time!)
The problem that I hear most often in regard to mechanizing this process has the basic form, “Obviously, you need a human in the loop because of all the cases where you need to be able to recognize that a correlation is spurious, and thus to ignore it, and that comes from having good background knowledge.”
Those people should be glad they’ve never heard of TETRAD—their heads might have exploded!
That’s a cute result!
For anyone else curious about the published paper, it’s freely available. Annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to say the standard deviation of number of sex partners for women under each condition, only averages, so it’s hard to do an independent statistical check. The authors did do their own test:
Number of sexual partners. The two-way ANOVA on self-reports of the number of sexual partners yielded no significant effects, F < 1, but the data did strongly favor the predicted pattern (see Figure 2). That is, men reported more sexual partners than did women in the exposure threat condition (3.7 vs. 2.6, η² = .03), where gender expectations are most salient. The magnitude of the sex difference decreased in the anonymity condition (4.2 vs. 3.4, η² = .01), and the direction of the difference actually reversed in the bogus pipeline condition, with men reporting fewer partners than women (4.0 vs. 4.4, η² = .001).
The ‘bogus pipeline condition’ is one where the women were hooked up to a (not working) lie detector.
(Fixed) link to earlier discussion of this paper in the last open thread.
(Edit—that’s what I get for posting in this thread without refreshing the page. cousin_it already linked it.)
See e.g. some U.K. data here, or the U.S. data here (which conveniently control for race, so that the trends are strikingly obvious as a class phenomenon).
Thanks! I think I misinterpreted your earlier post; when I wrote the grandparent comment, I had read ‘monogamy’ as you referring to faithful long-term one-on-one relationships, not just the subset of those relationships that are marriages. But it sounds like you mean marriage proper, in which case I think you’re right (albeit depending on what scale of ‘environment’ we’re talking about).
However, even regardless of any research data, things should be obvious from common knowledge and everyday observations. There are clearly lots of men around for whom getting into any relationship with a woman would be a Herculean accomplishment, even more of those who struggle with positive but still meager results, and a minority for whom getting laid with attractive women is almost trivial, who easily rack up many dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of notches.
If I’m honest, my own everyday observations and knowledge don’t seem to be strong evidence of all three of: (1) breakdown of monogamous norms, (2) a concurrent increase in female hypergamy ‘where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place’, and (3) a causal relationship between #1 and #2. It doesn’t help that I didn’t even hit adolescence until last decade—I expect I have much less experience of relationship trends over time than you.
It seems plausible to me that men have a much wider variance in heterosexual sex partners than women, but I’m not sure it’s definitively confirmed—or that the variance ratio has increased over the last few decades because of a decline in monogamous norms. The PNAS article suggests that a failure to account for prostitutes in sex surveys can explain the male-female difference in mean number of sexual partners, which hints that it might also explain the male-female difference in variance, too. (After all, excluding female prostitutes from a survey is a little like chopping the right tail off the female sex partner distribution, which would decrease its variance.) The other review article doesn’t seem to suggest a clear trend in the male-female variance ratio over time, either, although it looks like there is (surprisingly—at least to me) little high-quality data for judging that.
(And in some lower class environments, even the pretense of monogamous norms has nearly disappeared.)
You may be assigning too much credence to that news report. It’s really just summarizing an argument between two partisan political parties about marriage’s declining popularity among the poor. The only quantitative data cited is the number of UK marriages in 1972 and the number of UK marriages in 2009, which are not really enough to settle the claims made in the article or your parenthetical.
There is definitely significant large-scale evidence …
Which significant large-scale evidence do you have in mind? The lack of citations suggests that you think it’s very obvious, but I can’t think of it. I may well be missing something obvious, but without a cite I don’t know.
If q is a function of c, then h becomes a function of one independent variable, and your use of partials here doesn’t make sense, because you can’t hold c constant while changing q or vice versa.
I thought that this was the kind of situation partial derivatives are there for. AlanCrowe’s just applied the multivariable chain rule, if I’m getting it right.
I think your notation is still orthodox, or at least fairly common, nowadays. Wikipedia uses it on its total derivative page, for example, and it seems familiar to me.
Right, that would make sense, …
Right, but aren’t they typically followed by the appreciation of the insight rather than derision of whoever points it out?
I imagine the people who used the quote to mock Rumsfeld were already inclined to treat the quote uncharitably, and used its funniness/odd-soundingness as a pretext to mock him.
Wow, you have got to see Under Siege 2. It has this exchange (from memory):
Yeah, that got a giggle from me. Makes me wonder why some kinds of repetition are funny and some aren’t!
Yes, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is fun, but ultimately to be avoided by respectable people.
Agreed—I didn’t mean to condone simultaneously mocking Rumsfeld’s quote while acknowledging its saneness, just to explain why one might find it funny.
True, but it’s not really Rumsfeld’s job to improve reporters’ questions. I mean, he might be a Bayesian master if he did, but it’s not really to be expected.
It is (well, was) his job to make a good faith effort to try and answer their questions. (At least on paper, anyway. If we’re being cynical, we might argue that his actual job was to avoid tough questions.) If I justified evading otherwise good questions in a Q&A because of minor lexical flubs, that would make the Q&A something of a charade.
I notice that the items in Kaj_Sotala’s list all have in common that they’re not plurality orientations in society. That is, a non-plurality of people are transhumanists, a non-plurality take the Pirate Party seriously, etc. In that case, they might all be partly due to a contrarianism/non-conformity trait, a trait which would probably be socially influenced.
I’m not sure I’m capable of a good answer for the edited version of the question. I would guess (even more so than I’m guessing in my grandparent comment!) that once someone’s ‘ha ha’ reaction kicks in (whether it’s a ‘ha ha his syntax is funny,’ ‘ha ha how ironic those words are in that context,’ or a ‘ha ha look at him scramble to avoid that question’ kind of ‘ha ha’), it obscures the perfectly rational denotation of what Rumsfeld said.
So what would be the non-funny way to say? IMHO, Rumsfeld’s phrasing is what you get if you just say it the most direct way possible.
I don’t know of a way to make it less funny without losing directness. I think the verbal (as opposed to situational) humor comes from a combination of saying the word ‘known’ and its derivatives lots of times in the same paragraph, using the same kind of structure for consecutive clauses/sentences, and the fact that what Rumsfeld is saying appears obvious once he’s said it. And I can’t immediately think of a direct way of expressing precisely what Rumsfeld’s saying without using the same kind of repetition, and what he’s saying will always sound obvious once it’s said.
Things that are obvious once thought of, but not before, are often funny when pointed out, especially when pointed out in a direct and pithy way. That’s basically how observational comedians operate. (See also Yogi Berra.) It’s one of those quirks of human behavior a public speaker just has to contend with.
In the exchange, it looks like the reporter’s followup question is nonsense. It only makes sense to ask if it’s a known unknown, since you, er, never know the unknown unknowns.
Strictly speaking that’s true, although for Rumsfeld to avoid the question on that basis is IMO at best pedantic; it’s not hard to get an idea of what the reporter is trying to get at, even though their question’s ill-phrased.
(Belated edit—I should say that it would be pedantic, not that it is pedantic. Rumsfeld didn’t actually avoid the question based on the reporter’s phrasing, he just refused to answer.)
Some ideas.
People didn’t/don’t like Rumsfeld.
In the quote’s original context, Rumsfeld used it as the basis of a non-answer to a question:
In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
[snip]
Q: Excuse me. But is this an unknown unknown?
Rumsfeld: I’m not --
Q: Because you said several unknowns, and I’m just wondering if this is an unknown unknown.
Rumsfeld: I’m not going to say which it is.
People think Rumsfeld’s particular phrasing is funny, and people don’t judge it as insightful enough to overcome the initial ‘hee hee that sounds funny’ reaction.
However insightful the quote is, Rumsfeld arguably failed to translate it into appropriate action (or appropriate non-action), which might have made it seem simply ironic or contrary rather than insightful.
(Edit to fix formatting.)
Agreed. I wish they’d stick to calling hard-to-read graphics like this ‘visualizations’ - the word ‘infographics’ implies a graphic designed to efficiently display information.
The worst part is it wouldn’t be hard to improve the graphic. They could drop the annoying 84-item list and just directly write the emotions in the 84 slots around the circle instead of using numbers. Enlarge the circle and blow up the font size a bit—then they can put the A to J list of cultures into the empty middle of the circle so you don’t have to keep looking off the side to cross-reference it. That’d help, even if it wouldn’t fix it.
Edit—I see that when they used that infographic as their book’s cover, they gave up on the idea of making it a real infographic and just made it into a pretty flower!