“As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.”
-- M. Cartmill
“As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.”
-- M. Cartmill
Advice for future creators of tests: There are people who live outside the US. No one outside the US cares about the 3rd person to be the second dead uncle of the fourth president of the US.
For instance, a majority of tommccabe’s quiz questions are highly US-specific.
The point here is that non-Americans will end up guessing almost all questions, making the whole exercise painful and useless.
“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
-- H. L. Mencken
By the EMH I mean this practical form: People cannot systematically outperform simple strategies like holding VTSAX. Certainly, you cannot expect to have a higher expected value than max(VTSAX, SPY). Opportunities to make money by active investing are either very rare, low volume, or require large amounts of work. Therefore people who are not investing professionally should just buy broad-based index funds.
This isn’t the right way to formulate an EMH. You can trivially get higher expected return than any investment by simply leveraging that investment. 1.1x leveraged SPY has higher expected return than SPY, and 1.2x SPY has even higher expected return and so on. As long as the borrowing rate is lower than the expected return on SPY, leveraging will always improve your return.
A better formulation would be that no strategy has a better risk-adjusted return than the market portfolio, which is the capital weighted portfolio of all securities held by everyone. If you restrict your investment universe to US equity only, the market portfolio is VTSAX (or SPY, they’re close enough). Then you could formulate the EMH as saying no portfolio of US equities will consistently outperform VTSAX in risk-adjusted terms, meaning, if we normalize the beta of the first portfolio to 1, then it won’t outperform VTSAX (which has a beta of 1 by virtue of being the market portfolio). Now my argument with leverage does not contradict this formulation, because a 1.1x leveraged VTSAX will have beta = 1.1. So if your normalize it to beta = 1, you get back VTSAX, which does not outperform VTSAX.
What is completely sad (besides this horrible murder case), is the inability of either website linked to present a coherent, rational argument. In fact, I haven’t been able to find one website that reveals all facts and then explains them with their point of view in a rational (or even semi-rational) way.
I find this situation almost as depressing as the murder. I couldn’t come to any conclusion based on the poor quality of reasoning used on most websites. Wikipedia, as usual, presents a decent collection of facts.
From the Wikipedia article I could only ascertain that Rudy Guede is very likely guilty. My probabilities for the other two being guilty are low (but have a lot of uncertainty), certainly not enough for me to feel that the verdict is correct.
You’re a rationalist if there’s a portrait of you in an attic somewhere getting increasingly irrational everyday.
I once met a philosophy professor who was at the time thinking about the problem “Are electrons real?” I asked her what her findings had shown thus far, and she said she thinks they’re not real. I then asked her to give me examples of things that are real. She said she doesn’t know any examples of such things.
“If you invest your money now, you might be able to make something like 10% annually with some risk.”
Speaking of this, does anyone know of any LW posts or other articles about how to make the most of idle capital with some risk? Ideally with the risk analyzed by a competent Bayesian.
“There is a courage that goes beyond even an atheist sacrificing their life and their hope of immortality. It is the courage of a theist who goes against what they believe to be the Will of God, choosing eternal damnation and defying even morality in order to rescue a slave, or speak out against hell, or kill a murderer… You don’t get a chance to reveal that virtue without making fundamental mistakes about how the universe works, so it is not something to which a rationalist should aspire. But it warms my heart that humans are capable of it.”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
“It’s hard to argue with a counter-example.”
-- Roger Brockett
Can you give a detailed numerical examples of some problem where the Bayesian and Frequentist give different answers, and you feel strongly that the Frequentist’s answer is better somehow?
I think you’ve tried to do that, but I don’t fully understand most of your examples. Perhaps if you used numbers and equations, that would help a lot of people understand your point. Maybe expand on your “And here’s an ultra-short example of what frequentists can do” idea?
“Science is interesting and if you don’t agree, you can fuck off.”
-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
“People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)” —Douglas Adams
Why does the Bayesian say that the probability of there being life on Mars is 0.5?
I think the Methuselah Foundation’s credit card idea might also be a good way to receive donations without people actively donating money. Probably also buys more warm fuzzies per dollar, since you can feel good every time you use your credit card.
“Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.” —Avicenna, Medieval Philosopher
Rationalist pickup line: “If I asked you out, would your answer be the same as the answer to this question?”
“If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.”
-- Umesh Vazirani (as quoted by Scott Aaronson)
Eliezer Yudkowsky can isolate magnetic monopoles; he gives them to small orphan children as birthday presents.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once challenged God to a contest to see who knew the most about physics. Eliezer Yudkowsky won and disproved God.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once checkmated Kasparov in seven moves — while playing Monopoly.
At the age of eight, Eliezer Yudkowsky built a fully functional AGI out of LEGO.
Eliezer Yudkowsky never includes error estimates in his experimental write ups: his results are always exact by definition.
When foxes have a good idea they say it is “as cunning as Eliezer Yudkowsky”.
Apple pays Eliezer Yudkowsky 99 cents every time he listens to a song.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can kill two stones with one bird.
When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can derive the Axiom of Choice from ZF Set Theory.
-- The Big Bang Theory