I think it does. Bayes gets mentioned a lot around here, but there are not that many clear and accessible examples on how to go and analyze a real question; I recently read Proving History, despite no particular interest in the topic (Jesus’ historicity), just to get a better idea of how people do it in practice.
dhoe
Having lived for 14 years in Italy, my impression is that several commenters severely overestimate the rationality and fairness of the italian police force.
I’ve spent a bit of time trying to understand what Watson does, and couldn’t find a clear answer. I’d really appreciate a concise technical explanation.
What I got so far is that it runs a ton of different algorithms and combines the results in some sort of probabilistic reasoning to make a bet on the most likely correct answer. Is that roughly correct? And what are those algorithms then?
I have this half-baked idea that trying to be rational by oneself is a slightly pathological condition. Humans are naturally social, and it would make sense to distribute cognition over several processors, so to speak. It would explain the tendencies I notice in relationships to polarize behavior—if my partner adopts the position that we should go on vacations as much as possible, I almost automatically tend to assume the role worrying about money, for example, and we then work out a balanced solution together. If each of us were to decide on our own, our opinions would be much less polarized.
I could totally see how it would make sense in groups that some members adopt some low probability beliefs, and that it would benefit the group overall.
Is there any merit to this idea? Considering the well known failures in group rationality, I wonder if this is something that has long been disproved.
Reactions: Hacker News, Metafilter.
I’m sure there are moral systems where living off your children is an acceptable moral choice, but I can’t say I’m very motivated to check them out.
Their actions were rational from their point of view, however. They just radically overestimated the probabilities of total societal collapse. If that’s what you expect, moving out of the city and trying to live from your garden and some goats might not be the worst course of action.
What are the practical benefits of having an intuitive understanding of Bayes’ Theorem? If it helps, please name an example of how it impacted your day today
I work in tech support (pretty advanced, i.e. I’m routinely dragged into conference calls on 5 minutes notice with 10 people in panic mode because some database cluster is down). Here’s a standard situation: “All queries are slow. There are some errors in the log saying something about packets dropped.”. So, do I go and investigate all network cards on these 50 machines to see if the firmware is up to date, or do I look for something else? I see people picking the first option all the time. There are error messages, so we have evidence, and that must be it, right? But I have prior knowledge: it’s almost never the damn network, so I just ignore that outright, and only come back to it if more plausible causes can be excluded.
Bayes gives me a formal assurance that I’m right to reason this way. I don’t really need it quantitatively—just repeating “Base rate fallacy, base rate fallacy” to myself gets me in the right direction—but it’s nice to know that there’s an exact justification for what I’m doing. Another way would be to learn tons of little heuristics (“No. It’s not a compiler bug.”, “No. There’s not a mistake in this statewide math exam you’re taking”), but it’s great to look at the underlying principle.
I started partecipating, but got turned off by the ridicolously detailed questions outside my area of expertise. Do I think a sack of rice will fall over when the Ethiopian delegation visits Ecuador in March? How sure am I about my prediction? It doesn’t seem to help me to achieve better calibration. I’m curious if people that are partecipating are getting value out of it, and what kind of value.
- 5 Jun 2015 2:44 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Summary of my Participation in the Good Judgment Project by (
Drinking has surprisingly little impact on those parts of mathematics where you just mechanically apply a couple of rules, btw. Just mentioning this in case others didn’t try to solve integrals as teenagers as a sort of self-check—it totally doesn’t work. Your ability to walk is a better indicator of drunkenness.
On topic: don’t wear these shirts if you aim at anything more than signalling affiliation with a particular tribe. It’s also inefficient if you accept the existence of interesting people outside this very small tribe.
If this is something that can be looked up in your PhD dissertation, where can I get a copy?
Edit: here (pdf)
The Schizophrenia Classification Challenge. I haven’t done anything difficult, which is the biggest surprise; when I read the description I doubted I’d even be able to produce anything useful.
I’d be interested. More in awesome stuff than R itself. I’m currently at #22 out of 99 in a Kaggle contest and am doing it in R, but don’t really know what I’m doing. I do find that participating there is not a bad way to practice.
Finally decided to enter a Kaggle contest. Apparently my bits and pieces of self-taught stats paired with good intuition is enough for (currently) position 14 out of 81 participants.
I do, but it’s mostly because doing it helps me focus. I rarely go back to read my notes. Here’s an example, for a book about SQL query tuning.
If anywhere in the EU is good, consider giving higher priority to places with low unemployment. It simplifies life tremendously if you can count on finding at least some braindead job by next Wednesday.
I have found myself in what sounds like a similar situation in the past and this strategy worked really well. Others I’ve tried that did not work out equally well were: hitchhike to France and just see what happens (all my stuff got stolen), make lots of money by writing a successful novel (having nothing to eat turns out to be very distracting).
In other words, I recommend a relatively low risk /medium reward strategy until you’re in a better place.
I wrote a task manager (to-do manager) for myself on January 1, and have been growing it since then. The user interface is inspired by Taskwarrior, but I use an sqllite backend, and therefore it’s 300 lines of Python instead of 30k of C++. The small size allows me to be flexible in testing various ideas I have around task management—a new feature is usually just one or two SQL queries away.
My most promising exploration has been to not accept any tasks to be older than 2 weeks. If I haven’t managed to do it by then, there’s something wrong—it’s ill formulated, or there’s some unsatisfied dependency that I’m not clear about, or I don’t really intend to do it. I’ve developed a check list to go through to collect some stats about why tasks get to that point, with the intent to recognize them earlier.
One of my major failure modes seems to be to totally overestimate my capacity to deal with people the longer I think into the future—I’m totally sure I’ll be able to confront my landlord in a week, but not today. Much worse than the usual discounting happening all the time.
My partner has requested that I learn to give a good massage. I don’t enjoy massages myself and the online resources I find seem to mostly steeped in woo to some degree. Does anybody have some good non-woo resources for learning it?
What’s so great about rationality anyway? I care a lot about life and would find it a pity if it went extinct, but I don’t care so much about rationality, and specifically I don’t really see why having the human-style half-assed implementation of it around is considered a good idea.
I’m interested in potential future meetups, but probably won’t make this one (flying back from San Francisco on the 23rd).
As someone spending a pretty solid part of my earnings on maintaining my aging former hippie parents, I’d like to point out that it’s a radically egoistic choice to make, even if it doesn’t appear at the time.
They dropped off the grid and managed many years with very little money, just living and appreciating nature and stuff. Great, right? But you don’t accumulate any pension benefits in those years, and even if you move back to a more conventional life later, your earning potential is severely impacted.