Funny enough, as a direct result of reading the sequences, I got super obsessed with Bayesian stats and that eventually resulted in writing PyMC3 (which is the software used in the book).
jsalvatier
Karma: 4,626
Likewise
If you want to see a billion examples of details mattering, watch anything about shipbuilding by this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM6R81SiKgA
Great description. Yes, I think that’s exactly why people are reluctant to see other people’s points.
Yeah, I wasn’t too specific on that. I do endorse the piece that jb55 quotes below, but I’m still figuring out what to tell people to do. I’ll hopefully have more to say in the coming months.
John Maxwell posted this quote:
The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it.
-- Daniel Kahneman
Reality has a surprising amount of detail
I want you to come up to me, put your arm around me, ask me how I am and start telling me about the idea you’ve got. Show me you ought to be in charge, because right now I’m a little lost and you’re not.
My desire is not for some permanent power structure, but for other people to sometimes and temporarily take leadership with the expectation that I will probably do so in the future as well. I think one of the most valuable things I do is sit people down and say ‘look, there’s this problem you have that you don’t see, but I think its fixable. You’re stuck thinking of things as X, but actually Y.’ And I wish people would return the favor more often.
In retrospect, I should have way more clear about this.
Yes, I was trying mostly to talk about #2. I like the dominance frame because I think this kind fluid dominance roles is the something like the Proper Use of Dominance. Dominance as enabling swift changes status to track changes in legitimate authority.
Seems like that wasn’t really very clear though.
I think I want to additionally emphasize, people being comfortable temporarily taking responsibility for other people. Sometimes I want someone to come in and tell me I have a problem I don’t see and how to solve it. I try to do this for others because I think its one of the most valuable services I can provide for people. Letting them see outside themselves.
No?
Thanks :)
Thanks, had to make a new link.
Submission and dominance among friends
If only we had taller been
There are certainly people who meet it better than others.
This comment on that post is especially relevant.
(Sorry for the long delay)
Ah, I see why you’re arguing now.
(And an idea that works for central examples but fails for edge cases is an idea that fails.)
Ironically, this is not a universal criteria for the success of ideas. Sometimes its a very useful criteria (think mathematical proofs). Other times, its not a very useful idea (think ‘choosing friends’ or ‘mathematical intuitions’).
For example the idea of ‘cat’ fails for edge cases. Is this a cat? Sort of. Sort of not. But ‘cat’ is still a useful concept.
Concepts are clusters in thing space, and the concept that I am pointing at is also a cluster.
Maybe I’m still misunderstanding.
Ahhhh, maybe I see what you’re complaining about
Are you primarily thinking of this as applying to creationists etc?
The part of the reason I put the caveat ‘people about as reasonable as you’ in the first place was to exclude that category of people from what I was talking about.
That is not the central category of people I’m suggesting this for. Also, I’m not clear on why you would think it was.
There’s not that many that I know of. I do think its much more intuitive and lets you build more nuanced models that are useful for social sciences. You can fit the exact model that you want instead of needing to fit your case in a preexisting box. However, I don’t know of too many examples where this is hugely practically important.
The lack of obviously valuable use cases is part of why I stopped being that interested in MCMC, even though I invested a lot in it.
There is one important industrial application of MCMC: hyperparameter sampling in Bayesian optimization (Gaussian Processes + priors for hyper parameters). And the hyperparameter sampling does substantially improve things.