Another thing to factor in: the cost of your time to evaluate the idea. If there’s a sufficiently strong probability that it won’t work (for example, because the idea obvious enough that it almost certainly will be done by someone else if there’s sufficient expected value), then the time required to evaluate the idea can dominate the evaluation, especially since the time could instead be used to evaluate other entrepreneurial ideas in domains that you have a comparative advantage in.
rolf_nelson
Cool idea. If there were an easy way to hide the scores on comments, you could wait a week to make the predictions and then immediately see if your predictions are correct. This would reduce the interval between making the prediction and seeing if it’s correct, which presumably would provide better training and feedback.
Under Robin’s approach to value uncertainty, we would (I presume) combine these two utility functions into one linearly
It’s also not clear which affine transformations of EU1 and EU2 should be considered relevant. If the question of ‘what fraction of achievable utility will we get?’ plays a consideration (for example, as part of a strategy to bound your utility function to avoid pascal’s mugging), then EU2 will get squashed more than EU1.
I’ve created a rebuttal to komponisto’s misleading Amanda Knox post, but don’t have enough karma to create my own top-level post. For now, I’ve just put it here:
- 21 Feb 2010 20:22 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom by (
- 2 Feb 2010 4:47 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long) by (
I said once in the doc that ‘truejustice claims that X’. Because I said ‘truejustice claims that X’ rather than just stating X as though it were uncontested fact, and because X is basically correct, I claim that my doc is not misleading. If X is untrue, that would be a different story. In other words, if komponisto cited FoA and FoA’s claims were true, I would not accuse him of being misleading.
Re: dark arts territory, I agree completely. This criticism should be directed more strongly to komponisto. My intent here is merely to repair some of the Bayesian damage caused by komponisto’s original post. Perhaps this will dissuade people from wandering into dark arts territory in the future, or at least to wander in with misleading claims.
Point-by-point:
Given that AK’s roommate is dead, a break-in was staged, and the coroner’s report showed multiple attackers, the prior on AK being a murderer of Meredith is rather high. On the other hand, if we throw away all known evidence, the prior of AK (or Guede, for that matter) being a murderer of Meredith is less than one in a trillion. I claim the former approach, where you use evidence rather than ignore it when it’s inconvenient, is preferable. [Edit: OK, that was too snarky. Let me instead say that you should start with a tighter prior rather than a looser prior where possible; it makes the math more tractable.]
That said, I think our main disagreement is on whether the prosecutorial evidence holds up.
Why do you believe DNA evidence flies around so easily? Quick tests: Do you find your beliefs about DNA match up with how DNA is used to draw conclusions in any other court cases that you’re familiar with? Why was RS and the other roommate’s DNA not found in more areas? Google any video of a DNA testing lab. Are they wearing hazmat suits and, if not, why aren’t the testers contaminating their own samples left and right?
I disagree the five pieces of evidence you listed (footprints, DNA-mixed blood, knife, bra clasp, cleanup) are discredited. I am interested in hearing why you personally believe each of them is not strong evidence. [Edit: if you limit yourself to one item, my order of preference is DNA-mixed blood, then knife, then bra clasp.)]
Outside of those five pieces of evidence, I also think you’re being too dismissive of the other pieces of evidence. For example, why is Knox naming Lumumba a non-sequitur?
If the basic theory was that multiple people, including at least one roommate, killed MK, then there was no reason to abandon that basic theory upon discovering Guede.
Am I correct in that one of our disagreements is this:
Observation: AK claimed she saw Lumumba kill Meredith. Lumumba was therefore detained by the police based on her affidavit, but Lumumba turned out to be innocent.
Your conclusion: The presence of this false accusation decreases the probability of AK’s guilt (?!) (Because it somehow leads credence to a railroading theory? You may be buying into a false FoA meme that the prosecution merely replaced Lumumba with Guede to save face.)
My conclusion: The presence of this false accusation increases the probability of AK’s guilt.
(a supposed handprint of Knox’s on a pillow in Kercher’s room) is an outright falsehood—as you will see from following Nelson’s link, it’s not even (close to) what that article claims.
Did you misread the source?
I said:
“One of Amanda’s bloody footprints was found inside the murder room, on a pillow hidden under Meredith’s body.”
The source I cited (http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/International/story?id=7538538&page=2) said:
“Guede’s bloody shoeprint was also positively identified on a pillow found under the victim’s body… Police also found the trace of a smaller shoe print on the pillow compatible with shoe sizes 6–8. The print did not, however, match any of the shoes belonging to Knox or Kercher that were found in the house. Knox wears a size 7, Rinaldi said.”
Anyway, a debate sounds like a fun use of free time; I replied to the comment you indicated: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1j7/the_amanda_knox_test_how_an_hour_on_the_internet/1gdo
Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long)
Note: this is a post version of the same document that I posted yesterday.
I don’t really care about karma. If someone isn’t interested in reading about it, then they shouldn’t read it.
I value your opinion. Please downvote komponisto’s post as well then (if you haven’t already) if you want to be consistent, as it’s (as of this writing) at +30.
Sounds reasonable. I wonder if there should be more survey style posts then, but on topics that will have verifiable outcomes. For example, one could pick out a topic from one of the prediction markets and discuss that. This would have the advantage that, at the end of the day, if someone come to the wrong conclusion, they would eventually realize they came to the wrong conclusion and have an opportunity to learn something from the exercise.
If your thesis is that debunking the content of a featured post in this forum, is not on-topic for this forum, then I personally disagree. If someone posts false information as a featured post, then I personally would prefer to be informed that it is false rather than continue believing false information. There are probably other readers who feel the same, and I hope this post provided such a service to them.
So edited, though I would have thought it obvious.
VuV, you have not addressed my claim C1, therefore I am ignoring your comments.
Would you have preferred that neither my post nor komponisto’s “the amanda knox test” were top-level posts, but that we had just both posted them as comments to the original “You Be The Jury” post?
Ah, but we know from the general pattern of votes (both for posts and for comments) that a certain subset of people on this forum do want to read posts and comments implying Knox is innocent, but do not want to read posts and comments implying Knox is guilty.
By your logic, does that mean you’re advocating that only people who believe Knox is innocent should post, and that people who believe Knox is guilty should not post?
Try to look at the current voting pattern on the comments to “Amanda Knox Test” and tell me there’s not a correlation between favoring Knox’s innocence and getting upvoted. (Don’t forget to load all the comments so you see the people who are negative despite making reasoned comments about the case.)
“So I was very surprised to find Adams was a believer in and evangelist of something that sounded a lot like pseudoscience.”
Yep. The Dilbert Future isn’t online so you can’t see the nonsense directly, but to get a feeling for what Adams was like before he started backpedaling recently:
(http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v05/n12/scott-adams-responds.html)
Unflattering, but (to memory) accurate, description of The Dilbert Future here:
(http://www.insolitology.com/rloddities/dilbert.htm)