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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?

#201

Post by yummyfajitas »

RodericDay wrote: post #185
edanm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"1. Bond posits Yudkowski thinks that racism is mostly due to genetic difference, and not about the deliberate, mostly political disenfranchisement of minorities." You don't need to take the author's word for it. Look at the article itself. The article is not about the question of whether race affects intelligence. It's saying that that question is much less important than the fact that individuals have different IQ…

I'm not gonna do a good job at explaining this, because it's far from my subject area, but the problem is that your demand for "the relevant part" asks for blunt evidence of a subtle phenomenon. When we talk about politics, context matters. Someone like Yudkowsky doesn't believe stupidly racist things, like a KKK member or turn-of-century politician, or even modern anti-immigration people. Bond's targeting something…

You have to suss this kind of thing out, and if you plain don't want to believe me that there's something enabling towards racism and sexism and other various supremacist ideologies in the LessWrong ecosystem, you don't really have to.

There is definitely something enabling about it. A lot of modern politics wants you to NOT believe black people are stupid criminals.

Yudkowsky would almost certainly endorse "if black people are stupid criminals I want to believe black people are stupid criminals, if black people are not stupid criminals I want to believe they are not stupid criminals". (This is the litany of tarski, which he endorses, applied to a specific case.) One could certainly view this as "enabling" supremacist views under the circumstances that reality supports them.

Is a fair summary of your critique that Yudkowsky is rationally and unemotionally reasoning about problems which are normally addressed via appeals to emotion, and this subverts emotional appeals to the masses to take certain actions?

I've read your post several times, and this is the most charitable takeaway I can come up with. But this sounds insane so I feel like I must be misunderstanding something.

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

#202

Post by Estragon »

zepto wrote: post #59
TeMPOraL wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Actually, a common theme on LessWrong was realizing that with better reasoning tools you're more able to bullshit yourself , and so you need to be extra-careful.

How do you be extra careful except by developing yet more powerful reasoning tools?

You don't take anything hammered out by reason alone as sound information. You test reasonable-looking propositions against experience, and until they've stood up against that test by providing accurate predictions with substantial information-content, you take them as provisional.

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

#203

Post by Estragon »

1812Overture wrote: post #133
1024core wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never heard it claimed that the Bayesian approach was robust to sophisticated idiocy Alas, nothing is robust to sophisticated idiocy.

"If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot."

"The trouble with fool-proof methods is, you're still a fool."

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

#204

Post by darawk »

iraphael wrote: post #118
darawk wrote: post #89

> If you get tested again, you can reduce your uncertainty I've always been bothered by statements like this about medical tests. This assumes that false positives are statistically independent. But isn't it more likely in general that false positives would be highly correlated in individuals, test administrators, or labs? E.g. If the same person takes the same test from the same doctor and sends it to the same lab,…

I think the idea is that, if you retake the test, your system will be in a different state (our organism's biochemistry fluctuates naturally). So if something in your system caused a false positive, there's a chance it won't be there when you retake the test and you will get a true negative. Basically, you're thinking of your blood composition as stateless, when it may also be counted as an "external factor".

Ya that is definitely the idea. The question is is that idea correct. It seems almost certain to be the case that sometimes it's correct and sometimes it's not, but i'm not aware of any research into which cases are which, and I think that is a huge problem.

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

#205

Post by eli_gottlieb »

gaur wrote: post #11
njohnson41 wrote: post #2

Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian", but because it is based on sound set-theoretic and analytic principles. If Bayes' theorem is false, so is probability theory, and so is nearly everything we know about probability. Edit: Here is a good…

I guess a hard-line frequentist (if such a person exists) would counter that you can't assign probabilities to hypotheses or fixed parameters. Then Bayes's theorem (and every other statement about probability) is true only when applied to statements about how often a certain event will occur. But of course, most people do assign probabilities to hypotheses and fixed parameters, even if only informally. Bayesian proba…

>I guess a hard-line frequentist (if such a person exists) would counter that you can't assign probabilities to hypotheses or fixed parameters. Then Bayes's theorem (and every other statement about probability) is true only when applied to statements about how often a certain event will occur.

If you model "thinking" and "believing" as sampling in probabilistic programs (which they do in some schools of cognitive science), then Bayes' Theorem becomes a theorem about how often certain execution traces occur when the sampling program is run with fresh randomness. You then need none of the weird metaphysics associated with "subjective Bayesianism".

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

#206

Post by eli_gottlieb »

TillE wrote: post #132
bigfudge wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But being a good bayesian makes you do exactly this. The process of describing priors makes it obvious you need to do a sensitivity analysis to check how much the prior is influencing the conclusions...

> being a good bayesian This is exactly what weirds people out about LessWrong folk. They talk about a tool as if it's a religion.

"Good Bayesian" in that context just means being an able user of Bayesian statistics, not necessarily holding any particular philosophical belief about what they mean.

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

#207

Post by eli_gottlieb »

entrode wrote: post #9
cwyers wrote: post #5

> In many cases, estimating the prior is just guesswork, allowing subjective factors to creep into your calculations. You might be guessing the probability of something that--unlike cancer—does not even exist, such as strings, multiverses, inflation or God. You might then cite dubious evidence to support your dubious belief. In this way, Bayes’ theorem can promote pseudoscience and superstition as well as reason. Oh…

I suspect Eliezer is targeted specifically due to his tongue-in-cheek presentation of understanding Bayesian statistics as being initiation into a cult. Also due to the author's familiarity with the topic likely specifically as a result of Eliezer's efforts to popularize the subject and his association to him resultantly.

Sure, but who cares? There's an entire field of statistics called "Bayesian statistics", who do actual math and statistics and don't give a damn about novelty T-shirts.

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

#208

Post by monkmartinez »

cobaltblue wrote: post #151
Retric wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your still stuck with: You observed X/Y. How accurate is your count. How accurate is your estimate of accuracy. How accurate is your estimate of accuracy of your accuracy estimate. ... recursive infinity.

Did you account for the possibility you're dreaming, or in a simulation? Or in a simulation of a simulation and so on? Yes, that's the curse of real numbers. In practice you set a limit of precision required, and a threshold of evidence you need to tell you that the precision should be more precise. You can get quite far with Newtonian physics without considering the corrections of general relativity, you can get qui…

It is going to take me more than a few minutes to parse this. However, I am relatively certain there is a lot of sarcasm in this snippet and I like it.

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

#209

Post by RodericDay »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #201
RodericDay wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not gonna do a good job at explaining this, because it's far from my subject area, but the problem is that your demand for "the relevant part" asks for blunt evidence of a subtle phenomenon. When we talk about politics, context matters. Someone like Yudkowsky doesn't believe stupidly racist things, like a KKK member or turn-of-century politician, or even modern anti-immigration people. Bond's targeting something…

You have to suss this kind of thing out, and if you plain don't want to believe me that there's something enabling towards racism and sexism and other various supremacist ideologies in the LessWrong ecosystem, you don't really have to. There is definitely something enabling about it. A lot of modern politics wants you to NOT believe black people are stupid criminals. Yudkowsky would almost certainly endorse "if black…

Someone who feels injustice, but hasn't had the time or resources to codify it into a calm rational treatise is said to be speaking from emotion. Someone who merely experiences base greed, but is able to justify it to themselves as righteous and deliberate and socially beneficial with a bunch of babble, is considered rational.

And so, the idea that the rigid set of discursive boundaries that LessWrongians impose upon themselves may favor a political outcome (the status quo) seems ridiculous to you, because you use "rational" as a compliment and "emotional" as an insult.

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

#210

Post by yummyfajitas »

RodericDay wrote: post #209
yummyfajitas wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to suss this kind of thing out, and if you plain don't want to believe me that there's something enabling towards racism and sexism and other various supremacist ideologies in the LessWrong ecosystem, you don't really have to. There is definitely something enabling about it. A lot of modern politics wants you to NOT believe black people are stupid criminals. Yudkowsky would almost certainly endorse "if black…

Someone who feels injustice, but hasn't had the time or resources to codify it into a calm rational treatise is said to be speaking from emotion. Someone who merely experiences base greed, but is able to justify it to themselves as righteous and deliberate and socially beneficial with a bunch of babble, is considered rational. And so, the idea that the rigid set of discursive boundaries that LessWrongians impose upon…

Can you find me an influential LessWrongian who describes making emotional decisions based on greed as "rational"?

Based on my reading, a profit seeker obeying his gut and losing money is irrational. In contrast, a social justice type observing that assortative mating causes inequality and therefore attempting to reduce educated women's marriage choices is rational. But maybe you've read more than me, and can figure out what I missed?

And so, the idea that the rigid set of discursive boundaries that LessWrongians impose upon themselves may favor a political outcome (the status quo)...

This is a completely new critique of the Less Wrong crowd. The normal critique, and the specific one you cited, claim that Less Wrong is too far from the status quo and concerns itself with things like the singularity.

Adding to my confusion is that in the very post you criticize, Yudkowsky explicitly advocates fixing intelligence deficits with "sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech". How is fixing every person with an IQ (Note also that Yudkowsky is explicitly advocating that if genius isn't uniformly distributed, as social justice types claim to believe, we should explicitly change the world to make it so.)

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