tgb

Karma: 1,844

tgb 22 Nov 2011 2:03 UTC
0 points
on: How did you come to find LessWrong?
To give you some context: I just registered this account after lurking for a time and reading much of the sequences.

I saw Eliezer’s Bayes’ Theorem article about four years ago, read it, learned some, and moved on. A year ago I came upon a link in a forum poster’s signature to HPMoR which I got into immediately (I had heard of it once before, but dismissed it as “fan fiction”) and then ended up here. The point where I knew I would stay was the quantum mechanics article which was a hundred times more insightful than any of the popular science treatments of it I had read before.

I had been reading similar ideas, presented much more casually, in places such as the webcomic Dresden Codak. Particularly in the very humorous article at the bottom of this page, I have used this article a couple of times to try to introduce friends to the ideas of the singularity. This short story was another that got me truly interested in topics of a similar nature to the singularity. This short story is another good way to introduce people to some unusual thinking. For a Bayes’s theorem introduction, this New Scientist piece was the first time it really clicked for me.

tgb 22 Nov 2011 3:31 UTC
2 points
on: Practical debiasing
On “Give Reasons”: I have read of a study (mentioned, for example here as being in Lehrer’s “How we Decide”) that students given a poster of their choice were less happy with their decision some months later i they had been asked to give reasons for their choice than if they were just given the poster with no questions. The study hypothesized that students chose based off of easily-explainable aspects rather than the aspects that actually affected their preferences.

So be careful what you give reasons for. Perhaps more aesthetic decisions should be left to the initial impression. For some things, we don’t want to overcome our biases.

tgb 6 Dec 2011 1:38 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Prismattic’s comment on: How is your mind different from everyone else’s?
There’s no way your pain sensitivity is finely calibrated enough to give 1.00 as an answer, let alone 1.0000.… ;)

tgb 7 Dec 2011 2:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Sabiola’s comment on: How is your mind different from everyone else’s?
I get no feeling like this at all.

tgb 8 Dec 2011 19:56 UTC
1 point
on: Open Thread: December 2011
I’m interested in conducting a simple, informal study requiring a moderate number of responses to be meaningful. Specifically, I want to look at some aspects of the “wisdom of the crowd”. I’m new here, so I want to ask first: is LessWrong Discussion a good place to put things like this that ask people to take a quick survey in the name of satisfying my curiosity? Are there other websites where this is appropriate?

tgb 19 Dec 2011 21:02 UTC
0 points
in reply to: radical_negative_one’s comment on: Open Thread: December 2011
Thanks for the reply—I’ll be posting it soon. Suggestions for other places that like to participate in thing like this would also be appreciated.

tgb 24 Dec 2011 13:17 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Prediction is hard, especially of medicine

The harm from delayed treatment is estimated to be around an order of magnitude larger than the damage prevented by FDA standards. The FDA’s current position is far too cautious.

Do you have any source for this? I’d be interested in reading it.

tgb 5 Jan 2012 14:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: Describe your personal Mount Stupid
It’s practically cruel of you to say this without telling us the textbook’s name. Even after bringing up this downside, I’d want to read it.

[POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment

tgb5 Jan 2012 22:13 UTC

15 points

18 comments1 min readLW link

tgb 5 Jan 2012 23:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: daenerys’s comment on: [POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
Yes, the even/odd question splits people up so that I can have half the people answer the first question in an open-ended format and the second in the “closer to A or B” format, and vice versa for the other half. I thought about anchoring effects here as well, but I couldn’t come up with any other easy way to split people up. Ideally, having Google Docs do the random split itself would be ideal, but it doesn’t seem to have that capability.

If anyone knows another host for such polls that does allow randomization, please let me know.

tgb 6 Jan 2012 1:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: [POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
Google docs doesn’t support (or has hidden this feature beyond the powers of my googling). Writing my own solution would be do-able, but without a server, this would take far too long. Do you know of any (free) sites that allow such options?

Edit: I’m also uncertain what exactly you are referring to. Is this simply to replace the first “even/odd” question? Or are you suggesting randomizing the order of the questions or something more?

tgb 6 Jan 2012 1:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: [POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
Good suggestion. Your particular process would have difficulties—eg: the over-estimate answer being very popular could easily (and would with the current results) make the weighted average above the actual value so replacing the lower with the weighted average would make both answers too high.

tgb 7 Jan 2012 22:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Doradillo’s comment on: [POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
There are some websites that operates on the assumption that this works on unsolved problems. You can ask questions of unknowns (eg: “how many copies will my book sell?”) and maybe get some useful information. I can’t recall the names though.

tgb 7 Jan 2012 22:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: [POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
This was the intended interpretation and I was considering wording the questions this way. However, the way I used is worded more similarly to what I am trying to investigate.

tgb 7 Jan 2012 22:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: [POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment
Thanks for pointing this out—this was not the intended reading.

tgb 8 Jan 2012 2:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: An argument that animals don’t really suffer
I feel obligated to point out that a lot of help that people give to animals isn’t helpful. It’s even illegal in many places to take in wild animals without a specific license, despite your best intentions. If you’re really worried about them, call the local authorities on the subject. Or donate to a wildlife charity. (are there any GiveWell-esque meta-giving sites for wildlife funds?)

tgb 8 Jan 2012 13:39 UTC
6 points
on: A variant on the trolley problem and babies as unit of currency
Where’d you get the $800 per life saved figure? GiveWell.org says of their top charity:

We estimate that just under $2,000 spent on LLIN distributions saves a life. This does not include other benefits of ITNs. And this doesn’t count donated money that is not spent on LLIN distributions.

tgb 16 Jan 2012 13:31 UTC
2 points
on: Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012
An unusual answer to Newcomb’s problem:

I asked a friend recently what he would do if encountering Newcomb’s problem. Instead of giving either of the standard answer, he immediately attempted to create a paradoxical outcome and, as far as I can tell, succeeded. He claims that he would look inside the possibly-a-million-dollars box and do the following: If the box contains a million dollars, take both boxes. If the box contains nothing, take only that box (the empty one).

What would Omega do if he predicted this behavior or is this somehow not allowed in the problem setup?

tgb 16 Jan 2012 16:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012
That’s a nice simple way to reword it. Thanks.

tgb 17 Jan 2012 17:13 UTC
0 points
on: Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012
Question regarding the quantum physics sequence:

This article tells me that the amplitude for a photon leaving a half mirror in each of the two directions is 1 and i (for straight and taking a turn, respectively) for an amplitude of 1 of a photon reaching the half-mirror. This must be a simplification, otherwise two half mirrors in a line would result in amplitude of i photon turning at the first mirror, an amplitude of i photon turning at the second mirror, and an amplitude of 1 of photon passing through both. This means that the squared-modulus ratio is 1:1:1 and all events are equally likely, and hence the existence of the second (possibly very distant) half mirror reduces the amount of light leaving the first half-mirror to ¹⁄₃ from ¹⁄₂ the intensity. I would be shocked to find that such a result is reality since it would, among other things, allow transmission of information faster than the speed of light.

Okay, so the obvious fix is to say that Eliezer simplified things and the real rule is that there is a factor of 1/sqrt(2) to each factor. Then the squared modulus ratio of the above example is 1/2:1/4:1/4 as expected.

But then I run into my second problem: suppose that there is a photon headed at a half-mirror. Turning at the half mirror leads to a detector. Going straight leads to a set of four mirrors which brings the photon back to the starting point. This introduces a loop in the system. What is the amplitude of the light reaching the detector? Intuitively, I would expect this to be 1 or possibly less than 1. Assuming that my above factor of 1/sqrt(2) is correct, then we get an infinite sum 1/sqrt(2) + 1/sqrt(4) + … which converges to 1 + sqrt(2). This seems very wrong—we would need a factor of ¹⁄₂ to converge to 1, but then the previous situation gives a square modulus ratio of 1/4:1/16:1/16 or 4:1:1 which is again unexpected.

So is there a factor on each term of the half-mirror and if so what is it? Since no factor would agree with both of these setups, what have I done wrong?

tgb

[POLL] Wis­dom of the Crowd experiment

[POLL] Wisdom of the Crowd experiment