Welcome and Open Thread June 2019

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Welcome!

In terms of users/blogs/posts that I don't expect you to stumble across naturally as you hang out on the site, there is all of Nate Soare's writing, both on LW [LW · GW] and on his own blog.

How many of you are there, and what is your dosh-distimming schedule like these days?

Welcome!

What sort of better are you hoping to become?

(Not replying "at the original post" because others haven't and now this discussion is here.)

That fragment of "Final Words" is in a paragraph of consequences of underconfidence.

Suppose (to take a standard sort of toy problem) you have a coin which you know either comes up heads 60% of the time or comes up heads 40% of the time. (Note: in the real world there are probably no such coins, at least not if they're tossed in a manner not designed to enable bias. But never mind.) And suppose you have some quantity of evidence about which sort of coin it is -- perhaps derived from seeing the results of many tosses. If you've been tallying them up carefully then there's not much room for doubt about the strength of your evidence, so let's say you've just been watching and formed a general idea.

Underconfidence would mean e.g. that you've seen an excess of T over H over a long period, but your sense of how much information that gives you is wrong, so you think (let's say) there's a 55% chance that it's a T>H coin rather than an H>T coin. So then someone trustworthy comes along and tells you he tossed the coin once and it came up H. That has probability 60% on the H>T hypothesis and probability 40% on the T>H hypothesis, so it's 3:2 evidence for H>T, so if you immediately have to bet a large sum on either H or T you should bet it on H.

But maybe the _real_ state of your evidence before this person's new information justifies 90% confidence that it's a T>H coin, in which case that new information leaves you still thinking it's more likely T>H, and if you immediately have to bet a large sum you should bet it in T.

Thus: if you are underconfident you may take advice you shouldn't, because you underweight what you already know relative to what others can tell you.

Note that this is all true even if the other person is scrupulously honest, has your best interests at heart, and agrees with you about what those interests are.

I'd trust myself not to follow bad advice. I'd probably be willing to ask a person I didn't respect very much for advice, even if I knew I wasn't going to follow it, just as a chance to explain why I'm going to do what I'm going to do, so that they understand why we disagree, and don't feel like I'm just ignoring them. You can't create an atmosphere of fake agreement by just not confronting the disagreement. They'll see what you're doing.

For a true Bayesian, information would never have negative expected utility. [LW · GW]

That's because they already have it (in a sense that we don't). They know every way any experiment could go (if not which one it will).

I understand that this means to just ask for advice, not necessarily follow it.

You have more at stake than they do. (Also watch out for if they have vested interests.)

EDIT: If you have an amazing knockdown counter-argument, please share it.

Personally, I’d prefer typos and other mistakes in my own posts to be noted publicly rather than privately. (I don’t know how common this preference is, of course.)

Yeah, typo-threads are pretty common and in my experience well-received. We have lots of non-native speakers on this site, who I think also tend to be particularly open to feedback on phrasing and nuanced grammar things.

Do what you like. I'd say that some people want to know, some don't. I wish we had tags like "typo" or "nitpick" because I might want to make a self aware comment that was one of those but we don't right now.

I suspect people like corrections but it's a hard thing to navigate with kindness at the forefront of "it's spelt wrong"

I found the questions hard to answer. I don't think the terms in #2 are well enough defined to give a good answer.

Ah, that's around the time that LessWrong 2.0 came into existence, and I assume we never got around to properly merging the old join-date field with the new database

There is a spoiler tag, but no collapsible sections (yet)