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Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#191

Post by Anderkent »

manish_gill wrote: post #155
jacobolus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LessWrong folks aren’t obviously better or worse at calculating priors than anyone else. The “problem” is that their hobby is spending their free time considering outlandish scenarios, inventing arbitrary assumptions related to such scenarios, drawing questionable conclusions, and then convincing themselves that because they used logic and math, their analysis must be correct. Plenty of other folks who spend time…

I've been saying t forever. Thanks for putting it so succinctly. LessWrong is a cult of people who want to be smart and they've essentially found a community in which certain assumptions and hypothetical scenarios combined with mathematical concepts make them think they've found the answer to everything in the Universe. They're no better than any other cult in my book. The problem is that it's only going to get worse…

I don't understand how you can be so certain that the hypothetical scenarios they imagine can't possibly happen. Even if it really is laughable, we spend a lot of money on laughable research (homeopathy, anyone?), so why is this case so particularly bad?

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#192

Post by Anderkent »

Apocryphon wrote: post #177
unimpressive wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascals_wager I don't think it would be fair to malign philosophers because they come up with outlandish scary scenarios that scare people with OCD sometimes. It's not like LW gives Roko significant air time or serious treatment (EY freaking out and deleting it was partially principle of the thing, partially the fear that somebody might follow this road of thought to come up with somethi…

It's less about the plausibility of the thought experiment, and more about typical online drama and hysteria that ensued, which sort of belies that LW is made up of mortals like you and me. They aren't hyper-rational machines, after all.

> They aren't hyper-rational machines, after all.

No one claims they are. In fact, if I was to name a single overarching theme of all lesswrong discussions, it would be the fallibility of human reasoning. How is having some reddit-like drama on an open internet forum even relevant?

ps. to belie is to contradict, whereas I think you meant the drama shows that LW is made up of mortals? Just making sure I understood you correctly.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#193

Post by Anderkent »

jacobolus wrote: post #109
woodchuck64 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been saying this for years, and this is a large reason why I find the LessWrong folks to be almost entirely full of it. Their inability to come up with accurate priors is completely lost on many of the folks who follow this kind of thinking. I assume you're saying LessWrong folks are more prone to miscalculating priors than most. Could you give some examples of this?

The LessWrong folks aren’t obviously better or worse at calculating priors than anyone else. The “problem” is that their hobby is spending their free time considering outlandish scenarios, inventing arbitrary assumptions related to such scenarios, drawing questionable conclusions, and then convincing themselves that because they used logic and math, their analysis must be correct. Plenty of other folks who spend time…

> because they used logic and math, their analysis must be correct

> belief in AI overlords ruling humanity, the technological singularity, cryogenics, or impending 1000-year human lifespans

I don't think anyone on LW believes these are 'facts' that are 'correct'. LW commonly thinks of these ideas as risks / opportunites that might happen (except for the 1000-year human lifespans, which is a new idea to me), and that it's probably worth investing minor amounts of money in case it does. In case of cryonics, that's about $20/month for insurance that covers it; in case of AI safety, that's a couple people doing research on the problem, and some amount of money sent their way.

The way you phrase it seems like LW people are certain that cryonics will definitely let them be revived after death. That's definitely not the case - in fact, IIRC, on a survey a year or two ago LWers subscribed to cryonics assigned lower probability of it working than ones not subscribed. It's not a cargo-cult.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#194

Post by jameshart »

philh wrote: post #190
jameshart wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you go off the rails around step 5. "Something being much more intelligent than us means that, in effect, it has almost absolute power over what happens in the world" makes no sense. Since when does intelligence get you power? Are the smartest people you know also in positions of power? Are the most powerful people all highly intelligent? "whatever the goals of the AI will be, it will achieve them". Dude, if in…

You're not engaging with the claim as it was meant. In context, no human being has ever been "much more intelligent" than me. Not in the same way that I am "much more intelligent" than the monkey von Neumann. You might decide that this means edanm goes off the rails at step four, instead. But you should at least understand where you disagree.

I'm still not sure you could assume ultimate power and achieve everything you desired if you were the only hacker news reader on a planet of 8 billion monkeys.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#195

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

exelius wrote: post #21

Bayesian probability is catching on because the technology has finally caught up to the point where it's feasible. Thanks to the web and the proliferation of big data, we now have enough observations that Bayesian models can be trained (this was always the hard part). This doesn't mean we don't need smart people figuring out what things the model should and shouldn't look at; but it's at least possible to do today. I…

> It also doesn't hurt that the Bayes theorem is at its heart a map-reduce problem.

??? I'm not following. You could say that (numerical) integration is a map-reduce problem but that's pretty trivial.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#196

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #178
Laaw wrote: post #14

I've been saying this for years , and this is a large reason why I find the LessWrong folks to be almost entirely full of it. Their inability to come up with accurate priors is completely lost on many of the folks who follow this kind of thinking. A couple of comments are saying, "no duh" to this article, but those folks likely don't realize quite how many other people are falling into this trap. "Garbage in, garbage…

Except that at least with Bayesian methods the prior is explicitly laid out. Frequencist methods when they are used to make predictions and get useful information out of experiments have hidden implicit priors that bias inferences in opaque ways. The very honest frequencists will admit that their procedures are only rejecting hypotheses so small as to have no practical utility. Others will use weird and dishonest dou…

If frequentism is so terrible, why has the field of statistics had so much success over the last century or so.

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#197

Post by yummyfajitas »

astine wrote: post #81
TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a general argument against statistics . Or math, in general. Yes, dressing your bullshit in math can make people believe you more, but it doesn't change the fact that you're lying. Are we supposed to stop using math for good because evil people are using it for evil?

No, it's an argument against using statistics without first considering the strength of your data.

How can you evaluate the strength of your data without using statistics? You've created a catch-22.

I'll speculate you have some sort of meta-heuristic and only apply this catch-22 under those circumstances? E.g. this catch-22 only applies to weird and socially disapproved topics?

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#198

Post by abecedarius »

cronjobber wrote: post #34

Here's a proposal: Bayesian scientists shouldn't select their own prior. Instead publish how your results would update any prior, including the one picked by me, the reader. I certainly haven't thought this through, but maybe this would make science more modular: combine the updates from M studies and calculate the new, combined update. Statisticians, does this work?

There was a lesswrong post on that back before they moved to lesswrong.com: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/share-likelihood-ratio...

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#199

Post by jacobolus »

Anderkent wrote: post #193
jacobolus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LessWrong folks aren’t obviously better or worse at calculating priors than anyone else. The “problem” is that their hobby is spending their free time considering outlandish scenarios, inventing arbitrary assumptions related to such scenarios, drawing questionable conclusions, and then convincing themselves that because they used logic and math, their analysis must be correct. Plenty of other folks who spend time…

> because they used logic and math, their analysis must be correct > belief in AI overlords ruling humanity, the technological singularity, cryogenics, or impending 1000-year human lifespans I don't think anyone on LW believes these are 'facts' that are 'correct'. LW commonly thinks of these ideas as risks / opportunites that might happen (except for the 1000-year human lifespans, which is a new idea to me), and that…

Substitute “plausible” for “correct” if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Either way it all so speculative as to be basically pure fiction. It reads very similar to me to various “scientific” defenses of particular religious traditions.

Again, as I said, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this. Little communities of people should do whatever harmless hobby is fun for them.

I just don’t find it very interesting or insightful.

If people want to spend time and attention and resources on existential risks, how about the ones which are clear and imminent, like wealth inequality, the retreat of world democracy and increasing power of entirely unaccountable and amoral multinational corporations, or global climate change, e.g. http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sa...

Re: Bayes's Theorem: What's the Big Deal?

#200

Post by eli_gottlieb »

unimpressive wrote: post #146
Apocryphon wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascals_wager I don't think it would be fair to malign philosophers because they come up with outlandish scary scenarios that scare people with OCD sometimes. It's not like LW gives Roko significant air time or serious treatment (EY freaking out and deleting it was partially principle of the thing, partially the fear that somebody might follow this road of thought to come up with somethi…

>I don't think it would be fair to malign philosophers because they come up with outlandish scary scenarios that scare people with OCD sometimes.

Actually, that sounds like a fine reason to malign philosophers. In order to consider "outlandish scary scenarios", you must first be quite sure that those scenarios are realistic. If they're not, then you're wasting everyone's time.

And yes, if your expected-utility expressions fail to converge because you believe in taking every Pascal's Wager/Mugging scenario into account, or because you don't believe in time, then you've attempted to take the limit of a nonconverging sequence and no amount of philosophizing will help.

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