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Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

johndcook.com

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Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#41

Post by chowchowchow »

yummybear wrote: post #23
madrox wrote: post #14

What the author glosses over somewhat is the method of sampling. If you read the first 20 pages, find no typos, and use this rule to arrive at 15%, that could be way off. He's assuming the risk of typos are evenly distributed when there's a lot of reasons it may not be. For example, the first half of the book could've been more heavily proof-read than the latter half. It's not out of the question that editors get laz…

In the same vein if the weather is good today, there is s large probability that it’s good tomorrow, but if it’s been good for 14 days there is an increasing probability of bad weather.

Why would this be true? What if we, by luck, had 14 days of good weather at the end of monsoon season? Your observation seems to be a function of the probabilities changing as the calendar date advances and not a historical run of good weather in the past.

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#42

Post by dugluak »

HAL9000Ti wrote: post #38
rspeer wrote: post #21

If the author is reading this: When someone provides you a pro-bono translation, by all means credit them, but do not let them host it on their own site. Frequently, they are siphoning your PageRank. They will eventually replace the translation with monetized content of their choice. A good translation takes work! If you got a translation for free, why should you believe it's good, or that it has no ulterior motive?…

You are exceedingly suspicious for no reasons, people just like to translate articles that they enjoyed reading, the vast majority of times that's the only motive.

reader is not the culprit. The website translating the content for free could have its own good/bad intents.

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#43

Post by whatshisface »

bluGill wrote: post #26
madrox wrote: post #14

What the author glosses over somewhat is the method of sampling. If you read the first 20 pages, find no typos, and use this rule to arrive at 15%, that could be way off. He's assuming the risk of typos are evenly distributed when there's a lot of reasons it may not be. For example, the first half of the book could've been more heavily proof-read than the latter half. It's not out of the question that editors get laz…

In the case of a book the first pages are likely to be significantly better than the rest. An editor knows that once you have invested in reading the first part of the book you are unlikely to put the book down. This means the first pages have to suck you in, and not do anything to make want to quit reading. The most important part is the first sentence as this is often the only part that drives your buy/leave in the…

>The most important part is the first sentence as this is often the only part that drives your buy/leave in the store decision.

I usually sample books from the middle. I wonder what the heatmap of bookstore reading really looks like?

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#44

Post by mirimir »

babygoat wrote: post #10
mirimir wrote: post #4

There's a trivial corollary, which I remember from my first physics class. Never base anything on less than three measurements. Or maybe it wasn't even physics, but rather carpentry. The old "Measure twice, cut once." rule is iffy.

Three data points is not the same thing as three measurements of the same object.

There's no question that three measurements of some property of an object are three data points. I vaguely recall that my first physics lab experiment was measuring something with a ruler.

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#45

Post by slededit »

chowchowchow wrote: post #41
yummybear wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein if the weather is good today, there is s large probability that it’s good tomorrow, but if it’s been good for 14 days there is an increasing probability of bad weather.

Why would this be true? What if we, by luck, had 14 days of good weather at the end of monsoon season? Your observation seems to be a function of the probabilities changing as the calendar date advances and not a historical run of good weather in the past.

Today's weather affect's tomorrows. They are not independent variables.

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#46

Post by Recursing »

gboudrias wrote: post #33
rspeer wrote: post #21

If the author is reading this: When someone provides you a pro-bono translation, by all means credit them, but do not let them host it on their own site. Frequently, they are siphoning your PageRank. They will eventually replace the translation with monetized content of their choice. A good translation takes work! If you got a translation for free, why should you believe it's good, or that it has no ulterior motive?…

Yeah this is weird. Also, if OP doesn't speak Italian themselves, how can they attest to the quality of the translation?

I'm Italian, for what it's worth the translation seems fine, even if the writing quality is not as good as the source and maybe the joke about "Bayesians being allowed to make such statements" is a bit lost

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#47

Post by dugluak »

rspeer wrote: post #21

If the author is reading this: When someone provides you a pro-bono translation, by all means credit them, but do not let them host it on their own site. Frequently, they are siphoning your PageRank. They will eventually replace the translation with monetized content of their choice. A good translation takes work! If you got a translation for free, why should you believe it's good, or that it has no ulterior motive?…

But this one doesn't looks bad, the Italian translator even goes beyond the article by providing visualizations of the concept.

Re: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

#48

Post by simulate »

This reminds me of an 1999 article in the New Yorker by Tim Ferris called "How to Predict Anything" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/07/12/how-to-predict...

> Princeton physicist J. Richard Gott III has an all-purpose method for estimating how long things will last. In particular, he has estimated that, with 95% confidence, humans are going to be around at least fifty-one hundred years, but less than 7.8 million years. Gott calls his procedure the Copernican method, a reference to Copernicus' observation that there is nothing special about the place of the earth in the universe. Not being special plays a key role in Gott's method.

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