Well, the buttons didn't do anything on my phone.
Okay, it opened in Fennec. A great example!
We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
111–120 of 361 posts
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, that makes sense. What I want when putting a music player to "shuffle" is not "give me something unpredictable" -- that's fundamentally what randomness means. What I want is "give me something new". Something new is not something random, it's something _different_ from before, if reasonably possible.
Which to a machine may as well be the same thing in either phrasing. You want something different from what you just listened to. To it, anything not 'that song' is different and 'new' potentially if also not 'just listened to' within a certain set amount of songs. Even without that certain set of songs being logged and considered; any picking of a different song from the last is verifiably random. Think of it all li…
If I understand you correctly, I think you missed my point. You're explaining how with true randomness, you get different stuff most of the time and the same stuff some of the time. That is true. But it's not what people want when they press shuffle. What people want is something _different_, and giving the same song twice is not something different. As another commenter wrote, giving multiple (different) songs after each other from the same album would even be undesirable, even if that could occur perfectly well with random shuffling.
A human pressing "shuffle" usually doesn't want randomness. They want pleasing _variation_. See e.g. the "Comparison" heading here: https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/20/generating-blue-noise-sa...
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#113I agree with the article that the study is flawed in its unwillingness to exclude the all-H and all-T answers. But I’ll go further: the original study is just silly.
“Make a sequence that looks random” is sort of a nonsensical ask. Looks random to whom? To our algorithm, is what they meant. There’s no such thing as a randomness test that can look at a sequence and decide “is it random?”, so this algo measures something else and uses it as a proxy for “looking” random to…the study authors, I guess? There’s no ground truth here; it’s chasing a ghost.
I don’t know what information we could even hypothetically gain from knowing older people score lower according to this algo—-perhaps that the paper’s authors are younger than 60 and thus picked a different “randomness-looking” algo than they would if they were older? At best that older people have an equally incorrect but qualitatively different idea of “random looking”?
Of course we did not learn that; we only learned that older people pick all-H or all-T more. But my point is that there wasn’t really anything interesting at stake anyway.
(Edit: expanding a bit)
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#114I agree with the article that the study is flawed in its unwillingness to exclude the all-H and all-T answers. But I’ll go further: the original study is just silly. “Make a sequence that looks random” is sort of a nonsensical ask. Looks random to whom? To our algorithm, is what they meant. There’s no such thing as a randomness test that can look at a sequence and decide “is it random?”, so this algo measures somethi…
I suspect many of the “bad” responses are smart aleks saying “11111111” is just as likely a “62536164”.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#115I was trying to find a mental way to do a true coin toss. Anyone has ideas for how to truly dig into some randomness? Maybe most would think it's impossible, but aren't we at least better placed to do this better than deterministic machines (or maybe we are not - the true free will debate :)?
I took the digits of a random phone number in my memory (excluding area code) H for odd T for even
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a sound approach. You're declaring what humans think random is first, and then throwing out any data that doesn't match your declaration. There is no way to learn anything from this. I also think 'HHHHHHHHHH' is unlikely to be a good faith response, but if the goal is to actually learn anything instead of merely reinforcing my prior beliefs, it doesn't matter. You need to find a way to design the experime…
You don't have to view it as "throwing out the data". You can just think of it as an alternative explanation for the data. Original hypothesis: Old people are worse at giving random responses. Alternative hypothesis: Old people are more likely give bad faith responses. This review is suggesting the AH is equally good at explaining the data as the OH.
Although technically, this would be P-hacking. You aren't meant to change your hypothesis post-facto to fit the data. You'd have to conclude no effect, and then design a separate study to determine if age differences correlate with bad faith answers.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#117I haven't looked at the details of the CTM method for calculating complexity (because the math symbols didn't render on mobile) but from what I can tell in the two state coin flip case more state switches in the sequence is more complexity? That's not 'more random'.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#118Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#119I feel like a lot of the comments here are written after only taking the test and many are not reading the rest of the article. The authors of the website are stating that they believe the study is wrong. The below/above 60 answer is showing you it’s incorrect half of the time along with data backing up the claim.
But their data doesn't make sense to be personally...
Only 5% of their dataset is above the age of 60, making their claim that they are getting 50% of their guesses wrong seem like they are calculating it wrong. Surely their cut-off should be at the 95th percentile of the data?
They shouldn't be guessing 'under 60' the same proportion of times as 'over 60', because their population is mostly under 60.
Re: We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are the instructions from the original survey. Those if destructions being under defined, yes that is part of thr entire point.
They are not, these are the instructions from the reproduction > Tap a sequence of 10 dice rolls. Make it look as random as possible; another person should not be able to tell if you made it up or if it was from real dice rolls. And this is the excerpt from the study they mention > Click on a number between one and six as randomly as possible to produce the kind of sequence you'd get if you really rolled a die [...]…
Indeed. This is very odd for a study designed as a reproduction of a different study. Why use different prompts?