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comment by gwern · 2021-10-18T20:17:21.817Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"Natural" can perhaps be defined with respect to the physical laws of this universe. So if you sum up the distributions from humans, Turning machines, tape recorders and everything else (properly weighted), you get a distribution for X if you knew X was a number being pulled out this physical universe. A god-distribution, if you wanna call it that - I'm sure you can come up with a better name for it.

Such as 'universal prior'?

Replies from: None
comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-19T04:41:26.576Z · LW(p) · GW(p)Replies from: Vladimir_Nesov
comment by Vladimir_Nesov · 2021-10-19T12:29:33.408Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's unclear from the initial term-seeking and this response, so just to make sure: it's a standard term, the usual reference is

  • M Li, P Vitányi, An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications.
Replies from: None
comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-19T13:04:33.795Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
comment by Dagon · 2021-10-18T21:46:40.341Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You always have some context.  Who's asking, and what happens if you're right or wrong?  Or more generally, why did this come to mind as a prediction to make?

Which means you usually only need one level of meta.  You have a distribution of distributions that you've come across. You can perhaps adjust it to a distribution of distributions for this category of question.

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comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-19T05:04:50.553Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
comment by Slider · 2021-10-19T14:52:28.655Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There can be a difference between "a unknown thing that is a probability distribution" and "a thing that a probability distribution doesn't exists for". For the latter case what ends up happening is that one is crafted up althought the choice which crafting is correct can be interesting.

Do note that we live in a general relativistic bendy spacetime which is hardly newtonian. Newtonian the is go-to for explicit analysis but enforcing that would be requiring fiction out of reality. When one tries to be emcompassing nad go "outside the box" being aware of your boxes is very helpful.

Replies from: None
comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-19T15:17:43.338Z · LW(p) · GW(p)Replies from: Slider
comment by Slider · 2021-10-19T15:51:54.187Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"an unknown thing that is a probabilty distribution" would be a thing that fullfills the definition of a distribution without knowing much else about it. If you have multiple dice and you get a number but don't know from which dice it came from (say d6, d20 and d4) the fact that is coming from a die could affect things.

"A thing that a probability distribution doesn't exist for" where the birth of the value is so nebolous there are no good boundary conditions what it could have been. https://xkcd.com/221/ if there was no "//chosen by fair dice roll" one woudl have no idea about the selection process. This migth potentially be too shaky a concept to be interesting. One could have the opinion that single cases always have a reference class even if they belong to multiple such ones and a single "right one" doesn't exist. But what happens if you single case is so bizarre you can't describe it? What happens if you single case is the whole of all the reference classes it belongs to (Saying that "X is a smerp" is not helpful if the whole definition of a smerp is to point at X and say "like that")?

Other failure modes could be to fail to have properties of probabilty distributions. Negative numbers, imaginary amounts? Not an unknown probability distribuiton because its not a probabilty distribution (probably is still very unknown). Questions involving infidesimals like "Given a uniformly random number between 0 and 1 is it twice more likely it to be in the interval from epsilon to 3*epsilon than in the interval from 3*epsilon to 4*epsilon" The probability math might have trouble because measures make limited sense rather than the entities involved being numbers. Are transfinite ordinals numbers? If your random pull is aleph-null does it have any sensible distributions to be drawn from? Dealing with other "exotic" numbers systematically might get tricksy.

Replies from: __nobody, None
comment by __nobody · 2021-10-19T16:49:18.273Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Other failure modes could be to fail to have properties of probabilty distributions. Negative numbers, imaginary amounts? Not an unknown probability distribuiton because its not a probabilty distribution[...]

Not every probability distribution has to result in real numbers. A distribution that gets me complex numbers or letters from the set { A, B, C } is still a distribution. And while some things may be vastly easier to describe when using quasiprobability distributions (involving "negative probabilities"), that is a choice of the specific approach to modeling, not a necessity. You still get observations for which you can form at least an empirical distribution. A full model using only "real probabilities" may be much more complex, but it's not fundamentally impossible.

If your random pull is aleph-null does it have any sensible distributions to be drawn from? Dealing with other "exotic" numbers systematically might get tricksy.

Use a mixture distribution, combining e.g. a discrete part (specific huge numbers outside of the reals) with a continuous part (describing observable real numbers).

Questions involving infidesimals like "Given a uniformly random number between 0 and 1 is it twice more likely it to be in the interval from epsilon to 3*epsilon than in the interval from 3*epsilon to 4*epsilon"[...]

That doesn't typecheck. Epsilon isn't a number, it's a symbol for a limit process ("for epsilon approaching zero, ...") If you actually treat it as the limit process, then that question makes sense and you can just compute the answer. If you treat it as an infinitesimal number and throw it into the reals without extending the rest of your theoretical building blocks, then of course you can't get meaningful answers.

Replies from: Slider
comment by Slider · 2021-10-19T20:52:12.963Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I mean negative or imaginary probablities. Quasipropability distributions fail to be probability distributions. If I have a "random apple" and somebody ask what proprtion of it might be "pear" then that will be 0 as pears are not apples. If I meant to ask "random fruit" then pears would be relevant. While you get some analysis and there is hope to get to a probability distribution analysis, you would need a entirely depenable way to produce the reformulation. Just because some vechicles are amphibous doesn't mean you can take a boat and drive it on land (because some boats are also cars).

{0,1,2,3,4,5,6...|}=omega is an exact surreal number and 1/omega = epsilon is an exact surreal number. Yes, the base approach is to make your terms clear and if there remain ambiguity in the core part of the question it is going to critically confuse you. I didn't provide enough clues to glue in what I was talking about. It is kind of telling that the "default frame" will push into all spaces not specifically specified to be against it even if it is pushing square peg throught a round hole.

One could easily think that which such a "easy" construction "uniform between 0 and 1" seems like easy to understand. I am trying to highlight a situation where the thign is so basic it seems it would be reasonable to trancend particular formalizations. "getting a propability" and "throwing into the reals" can be slightly different operations when you would need to throw it into others than reals to make your calculation work.

Here specifically you can dance it around if you cast small against small into real numbers or bigs against bigs into real numbers. But when you would need to respect the things compared to belong to different archimedean fields things break down. For casting into a single archimedean field everything that fails to be a finite length line will get rounded to nearest real precision of 0 and then all zeroes are equal failing to distinguish single points from infinitely short lines.

comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-19T16:47:39.303Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
comment by DirectedEvolution (AllAmericanBreakfast) · 2021-10-19T16:22:49.811Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Look up Q-Q plots, which are a mathematical tool to solve this problem.

Replies from: None
comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-19T16:55:55.034Z · LW(p) · GW(p)Replies from: AllAmericanBreakfast
comment by DirectedEvolution (AllAmericanBreakfast) · 2021-10-19T21:28:47.821Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Sure! A Q-Q plot allows you to see how well a collection of data points fits a particular probability distribution. For example, let’s say you generate 20,000 random points from a student T distribution, and try to fit them to a normal distribution with an identical mean. The Q-Q plot may show that your points diverge from the distribution expected if the data was drawn from a normal distribution, but that it is a good fit for a student T distribution. I’ve found (in my limited coursework experience) that you often need lots of data points to get clarity on this, because the differences are most apparent in the extreme values far out in the tails.

This is connected to a broader class of mathematical challenges, such as curve fitting. If you look up courses on predictive analytics, you’ll find many examples of challenges related to the one you articulate here, along with tools for solving them!

Replies from: None
comment by [deleted] · 2021-10-20T02:17:46.443Z · LW(p) · GW(p)Replies from: AllAmericanBreakfast
comment by DirectedEvolution (AllAmericanBreakfast) · 2021-10-20T02:51:14.202Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, you can get a very nice visualization with a simple one-liner in R! I use qqPlot from the cars library.