philh

Karma: 7,678

philh Jan 21, 2024, 8:01 PM
2 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Planet Money: The Maine Potato War

The standard potato today is the russet, mostly associated with Idaho and Washington, but in the… 70s? 80s?… it was some other kind from Maine.

These potatos were sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and in particular you could buy and sell futures there. Futures are good for hedging, farmers could lock in the price early to avoid risk of a crash, and buyers could lock it in early to avoid risk of a rise. You could also just speculate, with no intention of ever seeing a potato. Speculators are generally good for markets because they put a bunch of money in there which helps them flow better.

The big Western potato farmers didn’t like that Maine potatos were on the exchange, because it gave them an advantage. So one year they entered the market with like a million dollars worth of contracts. (I vaguely recall that these were buy contracts, but I think it fits better with the rest of the story if they were sell.) Trading is weird for the year, and when things finally play out after close date, the Western farmers collectively owe the market millions of pounds of Maine potatoes, possibly more than existed in the entire state of Maine.

They try to get around it by offering russet potatoes instead, but buyers say no dice. So in the end they just default. They have to pay back the buyers plus pay heavy fines. I think banned from the exchange for a bit? Short term expensive for them.

But long term very good for them! Markets don’t like defaults, so the Maine potatoes are removed from the exchange a bit later.

philh Jan 19, 2024, 10:30 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them

I think he is using the argument as a soldier.

I see. That’s not a sense I pick up on myself, but I suppose it’s not worth litigating.

To be clear, skimming my previous posts, I don’t see anything that I don’t endorse when it comes to literary criticism. Like, if I’ve said something that you agree with most of the time, but disagree with for literary criticism, then we likely disagree. (Though of course there may be subtleties e.g. in the way that I think something applies when the topic is literary criticism.)

You mention that “awesome” and “terrible” are very subjective words, unlike “blue”, and this is relevant. I agree. Similarly, media criticism is very subjective, unlike dress colors.

Media criticism can be very subjective, but it doesn’t have to be. “I love Star Wars” is more subjective than “Star Wars is great” is more subjective than “Star Wars is a technical masterpiece of the art of filmmaking” is more subjective than “Star Wars is a book about a young boy who goes to wizard school”. And as I said above:

I’m comfortable with “Luke is a Jedi”, and I think it’s importantly different from, say, “Yoda is wise” or “the Death Star is indestructible” or “the Emperor has been defeated once and for all”.

And I think the ways it’s different are similar to the differences between claims about base-level reality like “Tim Cook is a CEO” versus “the Dalai Lama is wise” or “the Titanic is unsinkable” or “Napoleon has been defeated once and for all”.

philh Jan 18, 2024, 6:07 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Planet money #904 (6 Apr 2019): Joke Theft

Meg is an Internet comedian. After a picture of Kanye kissing Kim at some ceremony, she photoshopped it to be a pic of Kanye kissing Kanye. It went viral. But her own tweet only got a couple hundred likes. Most of the viral came from an Instagram account called Fuck Jerry which has 14 million followers and reposted it without credit.

And Fuck Jerry does that a lot, and gets a lot of ad money, including from Comedy Central who should know better than to support someone who keeps stealing from comedians. So that made Meg kinda mad.

Stand up comedy started after the death of vaudeville. At first it was just throwing out one-liner after one-liner, the jokes didn’t have much effort put into them so no one really cared if you stole them. Later the acts and the jokes got more sophisticated and comedians did care.

You can copyright a joke, but it costs $35 to register, it can’t be too short, and just changing the wording gets around it. This is partly to stop stuff like “don’t you hate it when...” from being taken out of the commons. A comedy lawyer couldn’t find any case of one stand up comedian suing another for joke theft.

What do they do instead? A comedian gives three strategies.
- Violence: every time you steal one of my jokes, I’ll damage your car.
- Warnings: if you as a friend of the comic see a known joke thief in the audience, write a message on a napkin and have the waitress deliver it to the comic who can then finish early or avoid using their more precious material. (Robin Williams was a known joke thief. He said he just absorbed stuff and couldn’t remember where it was from. Comedian says Robin once stole one from him, but at least when he called him out he cut him a cheque. It said “sorry for the inconvenience”, not “sorry for stealing”. But it was $200 which was a lot of money in the mid 80s.)
- Organizing: get venues to blacklist them.
Meg makes a campaign “fuck Fuck Jerry” trying to get people to unfollow. A bunch of famous comedians join in (I think Amy Schumer was mentioned). It works at least a bit, they lose 300,000 followers. That doesn’t sound like much, maybe there was more?

PM speaks to Elliot who is behind Fuck Jerry. He considers himself a curator, not thief. He wishes people would know he’s not a bad person. PM is not very sympathetic. He says he now asks for permission; Meg says that’s not enough. He says he’s thinking of starting to pay; PM says it’s unclear how that would work but it’s a bold thing to put on the air.

philh Jan 16, 2024, 11:22 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Thanks for replying. I’m going to leave aside non-fictional examples (“The Dress”) because I intended to discuss literary criticism.

So uh. Fair enough but I don’t think anything else in your comment hinged on examples being drawn from literary criticism rather than reality? And I like the dress as an example a lot, so I think I’m gonna keep using it.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean, see Taboo “Outside View”. My best guess is that you mean that “X seems Y to me” implies my independent impression, not deferring to the views of others, whereas “X is Y” doesn’t.

From a quick skim, I’d say many of the things in both the inside-view and outside-view lists there could fit. Like if I say “the dress looks white to me but I think it’s actually blue”, some ways this could fit inside/outside view:
- Inside is one model available to me (visual appearance), outside is all-things-considered (wikipedia).
- Inside is my personal guess, outside is taking a poll (most people think it’s blue, they’re probably right).
- Inside is my initial guess, outside is reference class forecasting (I have a weird visual processing bug and most things that look white to me turn out to be blue).
If so, I don’t think I am missing this.

I don’t really know how to reply to this, because it seems to me that you listed “acknowledging or changing social reality”, I said “I think you’re missing inside versus outside view”, and you’re saying “I don’t think I am missing that” and elaborating on the social reality thing. I claim the two are different, and if they seem the same to you, I don’t really know where to proceed from there.

Again, I don’t think I am missing this. I agree that “X seems Y to me” implies something like a gut reaction or a hot take. I think this is because “X seems Y to me” expresses lower confidence than “X is Y”, and someone reporting a gut reaction or a hot take would have lower confidence than someone who has studied the text at length and sought input from other authorities.

I think you have causality backwards here. I’d buy “it seems low confidence because it suggests a gut reaction” (though I’m not gonna rule out that there’s more going on). I don’t buy “it suggests a gut reaction because it seems low confidence”.

So I claim the gut-reaction thing is more specific than the low-confidence thing.

Well, that isn’t his stated goal.

Right. Very loosely speaking, Eliezer said to do it because it was kind to authors; Zack objected because it was opposed to truth; I replied that in fact it’s pro-truth. (And as you point out, Eliezer had already explained that it’s pro-truth, differently but compatibly with my own explanation.)

Yudkowsky doesn’t advise critics to say: “mileage varied, I thought character X seemed clever to me”, he doesn’t say “please don’t tell me what good things the author was thinking unless the author plainly came out and said so”.

Well, I can’t speak for Eliezer, and what Eliezer thinks is less important than what’s true. For myself, I think both of those would be good advice for the purpose of saying true and informative things; neutral advice for the purpose of being kind to authors.

Given the one-sided application of the advice, I don’t take it very seriously.

I’m not sure what you mean by not taking it very seriously.

Applying a rule in one situation is either good advice for some purpose, or it’s not. Applying a rule in another situation is either good advice for some purpose, or it’s not. If someone advises applying the rule in one situation, and says nothing about another situation… so what?

My vague sense here is that you think he has hidden motives? Like “the fact that he advises it in this situation and not that situation tells us… something”? But:
- I don’t think his motives are hidden. He’s pretty explicitly talking about how to be kind to authors, and the rule helps that purpose more in one situation than another.
- You can just decide for yourself what your purposes are and whether it’s good advice for them in any given situation. If he makes arguments that are only relevant to purposes you don’t share, you can ignore them. If he makes bad arguments you can point them out and/or ignore them. If he makes good arguments that generalize further than he takes them, in ways that you endorse but you think he wouldn’t, you can follow the generalization anyway.
I claim that this text would not be more true and informative with “mileage varies, I think x seems y to me”. What do you think?

Eliezer described it as his opinion before saying it, and to me that does the same work.

If it weren’t flagged as opinion, then yes, I think a “seems” or “to me” or something would make it slightly more true and informative. Not loads in this case—“awesome” and “terrible” are already very subjective words, unlike “blue” or “indestructible”.

This feels like the type of conversation that takes a lot of time and doesn’t help anyone much. So after this I’m gonna try to limit myself to two more effortful replies to you in this thread.

philh Jan 16, 2024, 9:20 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Fair enough! I did indeed miss that.

philh Jan 15, 2024, 6:43 PM
2 points
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in reply to: philh’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Hm, I think I’m maybe somewhat equivocating between “the dress looks blue to me” as a statement about my state of mind and as a statement about the dress.

Like I think this distinction could be unpacked and it would be fine, I’d still endorse what I’m getting at above. But I haven’t unpacked it as much as would be good.

philh Jan 15, 2024, 1:50 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Two differences I think you’re missing:
- “seems to me” suggests inside view, “is” suggests outside view.
- “seems to me” gestures vaguely at my model, “is” doesn’t. This is clearer with the dress; if I think it’s blue, “it looks blue to me” tells you why I think that, while “it’s blue” doesn’t distinguish between “I looked at the photo” and “I read about it on wikipedia and apparently someone tracked down the original dress and it was blue”. With “X seemed stupid to me”, it’s a vaguer gesture, but I think something like “this was my gut reaction, maybe I thought about it for a few minutes”. (If someone has spoken with the author and the author agrees “oops yeah that was stupid of X, they should instead have...”, then “X was stupid” seems a lot more justifiable to me.)
In the specific case of responses to fiction there is no base reality, so we can’t write “x is y” and mean it literally. All these things are about how the fictional character seems. Still, I would write “Luke is a Jedi” not “Luke seems to be a Jedi”.

Eh… so I don’t claim to fully understand what’s going on when we talk about fictional universes. But still, I’m comfortable with “Luke is a Jedi”, and I think it’s importantly different from, say, “Yoda is wise” or “the Death Star is indestructible” or “the Emperor has been defeated once and for all”.

And I think the ways it’s different are similar to the differences between claims about base-level reality like “Tim Cook is a CEO” versus “the Dalai Lama is wise” or “the Titanic is unsinkable” or “Napoleon has been defeated once and for all”.

philh Jan 15, 2024, 1:10 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Nod, in that hypothetical I think you would have done nothing wrong.

I think the “obviously” is still false. Or, I guess there are four ways we might read this:
1. “It is obvious to me, and should be obvious to you, that in general, talking about my own research interests does not violate these norms”: I disagree, in general it can violate them.
2. “It is obvious to me, but not necessarily to you, that in general...”: I disagree for the same reason.
3. “It is obvious to me, and should be obvious to you, that in this specific case, talking about my own research interests does not violate these norms”: it’s not obvious to the reader based on the information presented in the post.
4. “It is obvious to me, but not necessarily to you, that in this specific case...”: okay sure.
To me (1) is the most natural and (4) is the least natural reading, but I suppose you might have meant (4).

...not that this particularly matters. But it does seem to me like an example of you failing to track the distinction between what-is and what-seems-to-you, relevant to our other thread here.

philh Jan 15, 2024, 11:49 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
You probably don’t care about how it seems to me; you care about how it is.

Indeed, and as I argued above, a person who reliably tracks the distinction between what-is and what-seems-to-them tells me more about what-is than a person who doesn’t.

I mean, I suppose that if someone happened to know that the dress was blue, and told me “the dress looks white to me” without saying ”...but it’s actually blue”, that would be misleading on the subject of the color of the dress. But I think less misleading, and a less common failure mode, than a person who doesn’t know that the dress is blue, who tells me “the dress is white” because that’s how it looks to them.

I mean, in the specific case of the colors of objects in photographs, I think correspondence between what-is and what-seems is sufficiently high not to worry about it most of the time. The dress was famous in part because it’s unusual. If you know that different people see the dress as different colors, and you don’t know what’s going on, then (according to me and, I claim, according to sensible rationalist discourse norms) you should say “it looks white to me” rather than “it’s white”. But if you have no reason to think there’s anything unusual about this particular photograph of a dress that looks white to you, then whatever.

But I think this correspondence is significantly lower between “X was stupid” and “X seemed stupid”. And so in this case, it seems to me that being careful to make the distinction:
- Makes you better at saying true things;
- Increases the information content of your words, on both the subjects what-is and what-seems-to-you;
- Is kinder to authors.

philh Jan 10, 2024, 2:07 PM
3 points
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on: Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed

Alyssa Vance goes into an epic, truly epic, amount of detail to debunk the implications of the ‘sexless epidemic’ and of this famous graph in particular

Link seems to be missing?

philh Jan 9, 2024, 7:22 PM
2 points
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on: Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed

as the (let’s face it bad, but watchable if you don’t care, and worth watching if you need to learn this and other important related lessons) movie Ghosted illustrates

Note, wikipedia lists three movies named Ghosted. I guess you probably mean the 2023 one?

philh Jan 7, 2024, 4:47 PM
4 points
2
on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
But … “I thought X seemed Y to me”^[20] and “X is Y” do not mean the same thing!
And it seems to me that in the type of comment Eliezer’s referring to, “X seemed stupid to me” is more often correct than “X was stupid”.
Argument for this: it’s unlikely that someone would say “X seemed stupid to me” if X actually didn’t seem stupid to them, so it’s almost always true when said; whereas I think it’s quite common to misjudge whether X was actually stupid.
(“X was stupid, they should have just used the grabthar device.” / “Did you miss the part three chapters back [published eight months ago] where that got disabled?”)
So we might expect that “more often true ⇒ less information content”. We could rewrite “X was stupid” to “this story contained the letter E” and that would more often be true, too. But I don’t think that holds, because
- “X seemed stupid” is not almost-always true, unlike “this story contained the letter E”;
- But if someone said “X was stupid” I think it’s almost-always also the case that X seemed stupid to them;
- And in fact people don’t reliably track this distinction.
I think people track it more than zero, to be clear. But if I see someone say “X was stupid”, two prominent hypotheses are:
1. This person reliably tracks the distinction between “X was stupid” and “X seemed stupid”, and in this case they have sufficient confidence to make the stronger claim.
2. This person does not reliably track that distinction.
And even on LessWrong, (2) is sufficiently common that in practice I often just rewrite the was-claim to the seemed-claim in my head.
(Actually, I think I’m imperfect at this. I think as a rule of thumb, the “was” claim updates me further than is warranted in the direction that X was stupid. My guess is that this kind of failure is pretty common. But that’s separate from a claim about information content of people’s words.)
So I think Eliezer is giving good advice for “how to be good at saying true and informative things”, as well as good advice for “how to discuss an author’s work in a way that leaves them motivated to keep writing”.
What links here?
- philh's comment on If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them by Zack_M_Davis (Jan 15, 2024, 1:10 PM; 2 points)

philh Jan 7, 2024, 2:50 PM
2 points
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on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
I have an inalienable right to talk about my own research interests, and talking about my own research interests obviously doesn’t violate any norm against leaking private information about someone else’s family, or criticizing someone else’s parenting decisions.
I think you’re violating a norm against criticizing someone’s parenting decisions, to the extent that readers know whose decisions they are. I happen to know the answer, and I guess a significant number but far from a majority of readers also know. Which also means the parent or parents in question can’t easily reply without deanonymizing themselves, which is awkward.
This isn’t to take a stance on what you have a right to do or should have done. But I think it’s false to say that you obviously haven’t violated the norms you mentioned.

philh Jan 2, 2024, 10:57 PM
3 points
0
on: E.T. Jaynes Probability Theory: The logic of Science I
Spoiler alert, using a lot of tedious math (that we honestly do not fully follow)
I had trouble with this too. I asked on math.stackexchange about part of the derivation of the product rule. Apparently I understood the answer at the time, but that was long ago.
the most extreme is the ‘A implies B’ which many people consider equivalent to ‘B implies A’ where the correct logical rule is ‘not B implies not A’. Jaynes argues this is an example of Bayesian reasoning. For example if all dogs are mammals (deduction) it also means that some mammals are dogs, concretely if only 20% of animals are mammals this information increased the likelihood of dogs by a factor of 5!. A implies B means that B increases the likelihood of A by a factor of 5.
Had trouble following this because “animals” are mentioned only once, so to elaborate: we’re taking the background info to be X = “this thing is an animal”, along with A = “this thing is a dog” and B = “this thing is a mammal”. Then $A \Rightarrow B$ is $P (B | A X) = 1$ , and if $P (B | X) = 0.2$ then
$P (A | B X) = \frac{P (B | A X) P (A | X)}{P (B | X)} = 5 P (A | X)$
Jaynes’ very physicist-oriented example concerns the emission of particles from a radioactive source and a sensor that can detect some portion of these particles. The radioactive source emits on average $s$ particles per second drawn from a Poisson distribution and the sensor detects particles with an Bernoulli rate of $ϕ$ . So if $ϕ$ is 0.1, the sensor picks up 10% of particles over the long run, but if you have just $n = 10$ particles, there is no guarantee that it will detect exactly 1 particle. Similarly, even though we might have $s = 100$ particles per second, any given second might have more or less than 100 particles emitted. This is where it gets complicated. If you use the MLE estimate, you will always get $ϕ s$ particles as your estimate for each second of counts, because MLE ‘assumes’ that the 10:1 particle relationship is fixed and thus ignores the Poisson source variability. So let’s say you have a counter with $ϕ = 0.1$ and have observed a count of 15 particles on this sensor for some second. How many particles, $n$ , have originated from the source during this second? MLE will get you 150 particles, as described above. But Jayne’s robot gives us 105 particles. What? This is a HUGE difference! This example also surprised experimental physicists. The reason the robot gets 105 and not 150 is because the source has lower variability than the detector, so a high number is weak evidence of an above average number of particles.
Had trouble following this too. I thought we were trying to estimate $s$ and/or $φ$ . But that’s not it; we know s = 100 and φ = 0.1, and we know we detected 15 particles, and the question is how many were emitted.
And if we do an MLE, we’d say “well, the number-emitted that gives us the highest probability of detecting 15 is 150”, so that’s the estimate. We’re throwing away what we know about the distribution of how-many-emitted.
And I guess we could instead ask “what fraction of emitted particles did we detect?” Presumably then we throw away what we know about the distribution of what-fraction-detected, and we say “well, the fraction-detected that gives us the highest probability of detecting 15 is 0.15″, so that would be the MLE.
Which gives us another way to see that MLE is silly, because “what fraction did we detect” and “how many were emitted” are the same question, given that we detected 15.

philh Dec 31, 2023, 9:12 AM
3 points
on: Expected utility and repeated choices
There’s an unstated assumption here that you start with $0. Suppose instead you start with $0.5: then $E (U (a)) = \sqrt{1} = 1$ while $E (U (b)) = \frac{2}{3} \sqrt{1.5} + \frac{1}{3} \sqrt{0.5} \approx 1.05$ . So if you play game (a) first, you’d then prefer to play game (b) second.
But this doesn’t fully resolve the question, because you’d still prefer (b, b) over (a, b).

philh Dec 30, 2023, 4:17 PM
11 points
0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Here’s the exit.
It’s not possible to take the downvotes as a signal of this if downvotes get used for a wide range of things.

Perhaps not in general, but I think it’s often pretty clear. Like you’ve already said “I’m guessing the intention was to punish me for not caring”, and yes, I think you’re right. Seems to me the signal was recieved as intended.

Although if the person disagrees with whether it was bad, and the answer to that disagreement is to try to silence them… then that seems to me like a pretty anti-epistemic norm. At least locally.

Well, if someone comes here arguing for flat-earthism, I’m probably going to downvote without bothering to read their arguments. Is that anti-epistemic? Maybe, I guess? Certainly yes, if it turns out that the earth is flat (and that their arguments are correct). And “this practice isn’t anti-epistemic as long as we only dismiss false ideas” is, um. Nevertheless, I endorse that practice.

If someone comes around here calling people names, and we downvote that rather than checking in “hey are you doing this because you think name calling is good actually? Would you like to dialogue about that?” is that anti-epistemic? Again, maybe yes? But I endorse it anyway.
The dynamic would be pretty simple:
- After I downvote, I skim the replies to see if someone else already explained what had me do the downvote. If so, I upvote that explanation and agree-vote it too.
- If there’s no such explanation, I write one.
Easy peasy.
I do not consider writing these explanations to be easy.

I seriously doubt the number of things needing downvotes on this site is so utterly overwhelming that this approach is untenable.

I can think of a few places we might disagree here: how many things deserve downvotes, how costly it is to explain them, how realistic it is for people to pay those costs. I’m not super enthusiastic about trying to drill down into this, though.

But I also think I’m less optimistic than you about the benefits of doing it. I can think of multiple conversations I’ve had where I wanted people to change what they’re doing, I explained why I thought they were doing something bad, and they just keep on doing it. You yourself seem to understand what it is that many people dislike in many of your posts and comments, and yet you keep doing the thing. Surely there are cases where it does help, but I think they’re a minority. (It seems plausible to me that the helpful cases actually do get explained more often than others. E.g. if someone explicitly asks why they’re getting downvoted, that’s evidence they’re interested in improving, and also it makes them more likely to get an explanation.)

Another thing worth mentioning is that reacts reduce the cost of explaining downvotes. I dunno how much they’re used, since I mostly use GreaterWrong which doesn’t (yet?) support them. I believe they were only added to this post later, so they wouldn’t have been helpful at the time. But yeah, if a comment gets downvoted a bunch with not even any reacts explaining why, that seems not ideal.

philh Dec 27, 2023, 12:36 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Here’s the exit.
But it’s clear that some of what I said was heavily downvoted because I took a stance people didn’t like. Saying things like “Yep, I could have phrased this post in a more epistemically accurate way… but for this post in particular I really don’t care.”
Well, that particular comment had a lot of other stuff going on, and yes I think it’s a kind of comment that doesn’t belong here and no I don’t particularly feel like explaining that.
But also, yeah, I do kinda feel like “downvoting people when they admit they did something bad” is a thing we sometimes do here and that’s not great incentives. If someone wants to avoid that kind of downvote, “stop admitting to the bad thing” seems like an obvious strategy. Oops! And like, I remember times when I asked someone a question and they got downvoted for their answer, and I did think it was a bad answer that in a vacuum deserved downvotes, but I still upvoted as thanks for answering.
I’m not sure it’s so bad though. Some things that mitigate it as a strategy:
- “This person strategically fails to answer certain questions” is a thing it’s possible for someone to notice and point out.
- Someone might not have realized the thing they did was bad-according-to-LW, and the downvotes help signal that. (Maybe better to instead upvote the admission and downvote the thing they did? But that’s not always a thing that can be downvoted, or downvotes might not be specifically targetable to make it clear “this thing you did was bad”.)
- If someone did a bad thing and doesn’t care, maybe we just don’t want them here. Downvotes probably marginally push them away, as well as marginally push them towards not-admitting-things. Notably, I feel like we’re more likely to downvote “I did a bad thing and don’t care” than “I did a bad thing, oops, sorry”.
- Sometimes someone might take “not being able to say a thing” as a cost, and prefer the downvotes over the silence.
In general it seems like a hard problem, and it’s not clear to me that downvoting this kind of thing is a mistake.
I’d also really like to see a return of the old LW cultural thing of, if you downvote then you explain why. There are some downvotes on my comments that I’m left scratching my head about and going “Okay, whatever.” It’s hard for downvotes to improve culture if the feedback amounts to “Bad.”
I think there’s currently too many things that deserve downvotes for that to be realistic.

philh Dec 23, 2023, 6:01 PM
3 points
1
on: Bayesian Injustice
Notably, this effect could mean you differentially hire presties even if they’re slightly worse on average than the normies. I feel like practicing my math, so let’s look at the coin example.
If you flip once and get H, that’s an odds ratio of $\frac{2 / 3}{1 / 3} = 2$ for a heads-bias, which combine with initial odds of $1$ to give odds for [a $2 / 3$ heads-bias] of $2$ which is a probability of $2 / 3$ , and your expectation of the overall bias is $\frac{2}{3} \cdot \frac{2}{3} + \frac{1}{3} \cdot \frac{1}{3} = \frac{5}{9} \approx 0.556$ .
Now suppose you flip twice and get HH. Odds for heads-bias is $4$ , probability $4 / 5$ , which gives expectation $\frac{4}{5} \cdot \frac{2}{3} + \frac{1}{5} \cdot \frac{1}{3} = 3 / 5 = 0.6$ .
But suppose you flip twice and get HH, but instead of the coins being a mix of $2 / 3$ and $1 / 3$ heads-biased, they’re $p$ and $1 - p$ , for some known $p$ . The odds ratio is now $o := {(\frac{p}{1 - p})}^{2}$ , probability of [a $p$ heads-bias] is $\frac{o}{1 + o}$ and the expected bias is $\frac{o p}{1 + o} + \frac{1 - p}{1 + o}$ . I tried to expand this by hand but made a mistake somewhere, but plugging it into wolfram alpha we get that this equals $5 / 9$ when
$p = \frac{17 \pm \sqrt{17}}{34} \approx {0.62, 0.38}$
Where the two solutions are because an equal mix of $p$ and $1 - p$ biases is the same as an equal mix of $1 - p$ and $p$ biases.
So you’d prefer an HH with a most-likely bias of $0.63$ over an H with a most-likely bias of $0.66$ .

philh Dec 21, 2023, 12:39 PM
11 points
−1
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Alice claimed to be making significant income from her side business.

To clarify further, my read of things is that you think the inaccurate claim would be
- Alice was in fact making significant income from her side business.
but that you wouldn’t dispute
- Alice claimed to NL that she was making significant income from her side business.
Is that right? Or do you additionally think the second is inaccurate?

philh Dec 15, 2023, 8:50 PM
16 points
10
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
I think I’m less open to weird ideas on LW than I used to be, and more likely to go “seems wrong, okay, next”. Probably this is partly a me thing, and I’m not sure it’s bad—as I gain knowledge, wisdom and experience, surely we’d expect me to become better at discerning whether a thing is worth paying attention to? (Which doesn’t mean I am better, but like. Just because I’m dismissing more ideas, doesn’t mean I’m incorrectly dismissing more ideas.)

But my guess is it’s also partly a LW thing. It seems to me that compared to 2013, there are more weird ideas on LW and they’re less worth paying attention to on average.

In this particular case… when you talk about “We don’t want you to say that” comments, it sounds to me like those comments don’t want you to say your ideas. It sounds like Habryka and other commenters interpreted it that way too.

But my read of the the comment you’re talking about here isn’t that it’s opposed to your ideas. Rather, it doesn’t want you to use a particular style of argument, and I agree with it, and I endorse “we don’t want bad arguments on LW”. I downvoted that post of yours because it seemed to be arguing poorly. It’s possible I missed something; I admittedly didn’t do a close read, because while I’ve enjoyed a lot of your posts, I don’t have you flagged in my brain as “if lsusr seems to be making a clear mistake, it’s worth looking closely to see if the error is my own”.

(I am sad that the “avoid paying your taxes” post got downvoted. It does seem to me like an example of the thing you’re talking about here, and I upvoted it myself.)

philh

Planet Money: The Maine Potato War

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