Eggs

Don't judge a principle by its professors—look to its practitioners.[1] "Professor" is an interesting word. At one point in my professional life, I had the opportunity to teach college classes. I often corrected students who called me "Professor Eggs," telling them I was just "Mr. Eggs." "Professor" was a title...

This post is not "the solution to p-hacking" or even "the problem with p-hacking". But I had some recent insights into thinking behind the p-value approach and wanted to see how they apply to p-hacking as an issue. While p-values are a flawed approach to reporting final results, they do...

Today I experienced the Sequences post Beautiful Probability for the first time. I will begin by quoting the quotation that Eliezer began with: > Let me introduce this issue by borrowing a complaint of the late great Bayesian Master, E. T. Jaynes (1990): > > "Two medical researchers use the...

What would it take to convince you to come and see a fish that recognizes faces? Note: I'm not a marine biologist, nor have I kept fish since I was four. I have no idea what fish can really do. For the purposes of this post, let's suppose that fish...

A rationality exercise. Mikhail is a mathematician working on a particular conjecture. His goal is to prove it if true or find a counterexample if false. After thoroughly reviewing the evidence, he estimates — fairly and with well-calibrated confidence — that there's a 75% chance the conjecture holds. One night,...

Or: Why thinking about blue tentacle arms is not always a waste of time. 0. Introduction As I work through the Sequences, I find myself disagreeing—slightly—with a point Eliezer Yudkowsky makes in A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation: > Imagine that you wake up one morning and your left arm...

tl,dr: I might be bitter about what some people call logic. Suppose I posit and assert that both that A implies B, and that B is false. From these statements you would immediately conclude that A must be false. Given what I know about the LW crowd you might also...