su3su2u1

That Optional Stopping Thing

su3su2u1:

Remember that optional stopping thing perversesheaf brought up?  

I was responding to a work email about some model performance issues, and I realized the email overlapped a lot with the optional stopping problem:

Frequentist confidence intervals are, by definition, what the LW crowd would call calibrated.  If you estimate hundreds or thousands of parameters over your career with 95% confidence intervals, then you’ll find that you missed your mark 5% of the time.  Frequentist statistics could really be thought of as rigorous way to make sure estimates are “calibrated.”

Bayesian credible intervals have no such calibration guarantees.   A Bayesian has no reason to believe his estimates are “calibrated” and studies show that generally Bayesian estimates only overlap with the frequentist confidence intervals asymptotically.  

The optional stopping problem is a special case of this where the Bayesian credibly interval is particularly poorly calibrated (0 overlap with the true parameter), but in general Bayesians should not expect to be calibrated. 

You know how else you can achieve perfect calibration? Guessing. If you guess randomly over the solution space, you’re perfectly calibrated. If you want to make intervals, just choose the entire interval space 95% of the time, and a blank interval 5% of the time.

Wow, my new epistemic theory is even simpler to calculate than frequentism! And produces just as good results!

su3su2u1
nuclearspaceheater

Anonymous asked:

Does fundraising through e.g. running and having pledge to a charity count towards effective altruism goals? e.g, if someone raises 10% of their salary through encouraging donations to a marathon, do they "count" as having given 10%? I'm especially curious if there's research/discussion as to whether such drives encourage new giving or just divert money pledgers would have given elsewhere.

slatestarscratchpad answered:

If only there were an Effective Altruist Talmud to tell us the answers to problems like these.

nuclearspaceheater:

Are you really so sure that would reduce debate?

Probably not, but it would be more interesting.

nuclearspaceheater Source: slatestarscratchpad
raginrayguns

raginrayguns:

wrapscallion:

Maybe one of the reasons that people may refuse to argue with me is not because they are afraid of their idea being destroyed, but because they are afraid that I will dismiss it for weak reasons? No argument and no resolution can possibly be deemed a matter that is still open for debate, rather than one that is closed and settled by dismissal.

my mom dislikes arguing with me because she thinks I apply unfair standards of evidence for the purpose of dismissing what she says. I say, “how do you know this is true,” and because I ask she assumes that I’m just trying to get her to admit there was no double-blind study so I can dismiss it.

So, she knows she’s right, and she knows that she has sufficient evidence to be right. But she doesn’t know that when I think of “evidence” I include non-conclusive stuff, that the evidence that’s good enough for her might be good enough for me too.

So she doesn’t want to argue because she doesn’t think I’m reasonable enough to be convinced by arguing. It’s like she’s saying, “don’t try to look at my evidence because you’ll draw the wrong conclusion, just trust me because then you’ll draw the right conclusion.”

This is written sot of from her perspective…. I think a lot of the time her evidence really as not any good

this is how it used to be anyway… we had a conversation in college where she told me this. But we don’t fight as often now

That almost exactly mirrors a conversation I had with my mother a bit ago (or at least my memory of my internal narrative at the time).

How did you resolve that, or does she still think of you as unreasonable? 

raginrayguns Source: wrapscallion
oopstheregoesmysoul

wenevergotusedtoegypt:

sootonthecarpet:

it’s weird thinking about it, but progressive Xians often blame homophobia and homophobic laws on Jews & now conservative Xians are blaming marriage equality on Jews too

What else is new? We’re also responsible for both capitalism and communism, are simultaneously filthy rich and poor leeches on society, are racist for wanting to marry other Jews but at the same time are promoting race mixing/trying to destroy the white race via intermarriage, and are simultaneously clever enough to be running the world but also inferior human beings.

oopstheregoesmysoul Source: sootonthecarpet
kuvira-of-zaofu
alltheladiesyouhate:

mumblingsage:

mumblingsage:

degenezijde:

korolevcross:

sn0veralls:

what a time to be alive

just fuckign kickstart greece

Link

If you look at the reward allowances, this campaign is prepared to send every person in the European Union (503 million) a postcard of Prime Minister Alex Tsipras if they send in 3 euro.

2 more things–1. The campaign page is currently down because of, and i quote, ‘overwhelming popularity’. 2. It’s all-or-nothing funding. Which means if you pitch in a few euro (once the campaign is back up) and it fails, you get your money back. If the campaign succeeds, you’re successfully helped crowdfund a country, which has to be worth a few euro, right? I may have talked myself into camping out on this page and then donating money to it once it refreshes.

alltheladiesyouhate:

mumblingsage:

mumblingsage:

degenezijde:

korolevcross:

sn0veralls:

what a time to be alive

just fuckign kickstart greece

Link

If you look at the reward allowances, this campaign is prepared to send every person in the European Union (503 million) a postcard of Prime Minister Alex Tsipras if they send in 3 euro.

2 more things–

1. The campaign page is currently down because of, and i quote, ‘overwhelming popularity’. 

2. It’s all-or-nothing funding. Which means if you pitch in a few euro (once the campaign is back up) and it fails, you get your money back. If the campaign succeeds, you’re successfully helped crowdfund a country, which has to be worth a few euro, right? 

I may have talked myself into camping out on this page and then donating money to it once it refreshes.

image
kuvira-of-zaofu Source: sn0veralls
slatestarscratchpad

The Supreme Court, Described as Machine Learning

peterhurford:

The Supreme Court of the US is basically an ensemble of nine different highly trained neural net models that run a binary classification of whether a problem is “constitutional” or “not constitutional”.  Each of these models was selected based on how well they had performed on an in sample data set of previous decisions when they were run on lower-level decisions.

Additions to the Supreme Court ensemble model are selected from a wider space of possible models by a single neural net model that is retrained every four years by an ensemble of over 300 million models that are, on average, poorly trained, but hopefully together in a sufficent ensemble large enough.  Many of these 300 million neural nets do not cast votes.  Also, these votes are not done in majority rule, but rather according to a different weighting method based on the geographic location of the server in which the model currently runs.

For additional verification, additions to the Supreme Court ensemble are also checked via an ensemble of 100 other highly trained neural net models, each of which was selected by a smaller subset of the 300 million ensemble mentioned earlier.

Uh, the classification is definitely not binary; in fact, many cases don’t involve constitutional issues at all.

Also, you spelled sufficent wrong.

slatestarscratchpad Source: peterhurford

Neither.  But without the facts of what they actually did, and do.  I can only suggest you find someone divergent from the corporate direction of either, who upon hearing your goals can suggest or encourage a way they might add or contribute to your own efforts.  Both companies are filled with people who have never lived outside of the programming world and i wish were all fired for the lack of comprehension of values and outcomes.

By the Way Mr Google,  SELinux?  Do you want the entire nation of free thinkers to be murdered?  Do you have any idea how many times since 4.4.2 on my phone and 5.0 on my Nvidia Shield Tablet someone with access to the NSA SELinux shell has hacked and deleted my projects, blocked my calls, or damaged the microphone to not work for incoming calls, or made it so that my phone rings every time i make a phone call?

Why do you think the official Linux page on Google+ is a buck tooth idiot?  Because you idiots live in a pretty bubble and don’t understand this nation is attacking its own people in order to make war on anyone who knows the war on Terror is a Fake war to continue the Crusades and murder everyone who knows the Hebrew and Aramaika phonetics better than VatiCanus Hill.  Someone even hacked your Google Books and nGram data changing all the religious books to be older.  And someone else hacked the United Nations library to make sure Lincolns Bible is always the top search result for “Egypt” to scare and intimidate anyone who wanted to know history that predates the VatiCanus Hebrew Calender of 5775 years ago or 3,700 BC. Iraq was destroyed and then covered in Nuclear waste of Depleted Uranium to destroy all the carbon date records of a nation older than the pyramids.

Again.  Recruit someone from outside.  Someone who wants the reality that what you program for yourselves, lives on and cam be used by any corrupt or ignorant people promoted into your office after you are promoted and disgraced out of the way of the religious nuts who used Google to upload the patent office to china so that the State department could claim to be blind to the fact we are being surpassed in order for the VatiCanus to open up the metal tithe and murder of the animal powered agriculture of china as part of the Mythrus VatiCanus his has always pushed for in order to make men slaves to men.

Forgive the rant.  but get rid of SELinux ASAP.  I am trying to save this damn country from another Civli War and Cuban Missle crisis with the Russia to Alaska tunnel bypassed nuclear treaties for a surprise attack. And all of google is trapped in a damn bubble, so i can’t even volunteer to correct the dates of nGram and books.google.kabbluey or whatever.

People need to be able to download copies of out of print books rather than thumb through them.  And nGram needs to be fixed so that i can date Hebraice / Hebraic / Hebrew and etc histories hidden from the world.

Sincerely,  my grandpa encouraged the name Google, and someone wrote the check according to his recommendations.  Now you are a nightmare company trapped in military contracts hiring people from the war machine who don’t know, that their view of the world is a lie designed to excuse the destruction of the truth and the victimization and murder of the truth tellers. = CIA, Susan Lindauer etc people.

A really weird quora comment. See if you can guess what the question was about from the comment.
su3su2u1

su3su2u1:

ogingat:

somervta:

ogingat:

information-catalysis:

If only I read this when it first came out. Would lead to interesting results. Also now I guess I’m finally a Eliezer Yudkowsky fangirl.

But yes I agree that basically the fact that you can’t even envision how a world operating on a non-reducible system. Just like how would the universe even work if there was no logic or logic had different rules.

This is better than his normal stuff but still makes me want to punch things.

Interesting! I thought this was one of his worse/wronger posts.

He seems to be at least gesturing at an interesting point about the nature of explanation. I mean, taken at its least radical, the essay is just a kind of LW-jargon-filled statement of naturalism. The idea that nothing is fundamentally complex does seem to me to require dealing with the unity of consciousness, and I was surprised not to see him address mathematical ontology.

What did you think was wrong with it?

Because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment, I read the Yudkowsky piece, and I think it’s sort ok but it’s setting up the mistake made more clearly here of not understanding what emergent behaviors are or what they mean for reductionism. 

But there are things where reductionism doesn’t tell the whole story- collective behaviors matter.  The whole point of a large thread of modern physics (renormalization group stuff,etc) is that a lot of macroscale physics is independent of the microscale physics and so you are best off studying the macrophysics itself.  

Of course with these sorts of emergent behaviors you can still take the system down to quarks, but because the micro physics renormalizes out at larger scales, that isn’t going to tell you about most of what you care about.  You aren’t going to figure out symmetry breaking, etc, by looking at just the quarks or what have you.  

FWIW, he seems to have retracted his claim in the next post if I’m reading it right. (I seem to also remember not liking the idea when reading it originally, then seeing the retraction.)

su3su2u1 Source: information-catalysis
su3su2u1

su3su2u1:

thinkingornot:

su3su2u1:

Sometimes when I read something ridiculous on the internet that doesn’t jive with my sense of reality at all, I like to imagine there is some portal to another planet that the internet has some how breached.  

Last time I mentioned the Mandela Effect you got all upset.

I think imagine is different then claim to be the truth of things. 

I got the impression that many of the people talking about it didn’t actually believe it was true.

From http://woodbetweenworlds.blogspot.com/2014/06/commenting-on-berenstein-bears.html

9) I don’t really believe we switched universes.

Obviously, with my rational mind, I understand that the most reasonable explanation is that I misremembered.  Occam’s Razor and all that.

That said, I don’t really believe that we switched universes.  While my theory was certainly intriguing to me (and apparently no one else), I don’t actually believe it.  I don’t know if my theory describes the universe we live in.  Even if it did, I’d doubt we shifted.  The blog post was me having fun in a way only physics PhDs can, which is rationalizing totally irrational behavior with hyper-rational mathematical analysis.

I feel like there’s some good joke to be made about physics PhDs here, but can’t quite think of one.

su3su2u1