It's not the programming notation that makes it work for me (though that helps a little.) It's not the particular example either, though I do think it's a bit better than the abstract mammogram example. There's just way fewer numbers.
It's because the notation on each line contains two numbers, both of which are. . . primitives? atomic pieces? I can do them in one step. (My inner monologue goes something like "3:2 means the the first thing happens three times for every two times the second thing happens, over the long run anyway. There's five balls in the bag, three of the first colour and two of the second. Now more balls than that, but keep the ratio.")
And then if I want to do an update, I just need four numbers, each of which makes sense on their own, each of which is used in one place. 1:100, 20:50, multiply the left by the left (20) and the right by the right (5000) and now I have two numbers again. (20:5000) I can usually simplify that in my head (2:500, okay now 1:250.) The line "The colon is a thick & rubbery barrier. Yep with yep and nope with nope" helps a lot, I'm reminded to keep all the yeps on the left and the nopes on the right. Because multiplication is transitive, I can just keep doing that at each new update, never dealing with more than four numbers. If I'd rather (or if I'm using pen and paper) I can just write out a dozen updates and get the products after.
Compare this sucker:
Four numbers used in six places. I'll be the village idiot and admit I cannot reliably keep a phone number in my head without mental tricks. I have lost count of the number of times I have swapped P(A|B) and P(B|A) accidentally. The numbers aren't arranged on the page in a way that helps my intuition, like yeps being on top and nopes on the bottom or something.
Or compare the explanation at the first link you shared.
Bayes' rule in the odds form says that for every pair of hypotheses, their relative prior odds, times the relative likelihood of the evidence, equals the relative posterior odds.
Let be a vector of hypotheses Because Bayes' rule holds between every pair of hypotheses in we can simply multiply an odds vector by a likelihood vector in order to get the correct posterior vector:
where is the vector of relative prior odds between all the , is the vector of relative likelihoods with which each predicted and is the relative posterior odds between all the
In fact, we can keep multiplying by likelihood vectors to perform multiple updates at once:
I am trying to express I find that more complicated. I don't know what means. It took me a bit to remember what stands for. If you are ever trying to explain something to the general population and you need LaTeX to do it, stop what you are doing and come up with a new plan. Seven paragraphs into that page we get the odds form with the colon, and it's for three different hypothesis; I'm aware you can write odds like 3:2:4 but that's less common. Drunk people who flunked high school routinely calculate 3:2 in pubs! Start with the two hypothesis version, then maybe mention that you can do three hypotheses at once. "Shortest Goddamn Bayes Guide Ever" uses strictly symbols on a standard keyboard and math which is within the limits of an on-track fourth grader. It's less than two hundred words! The thing would fit in three tweets!
I think that is a masterwork of pedagogy and editing, worthy of praise and prominent place.
If there's a way to make this version work for non-naive updates that seems good, and my understanding is it's mostly about saying for each new line "given that the above has happened, what are the odds of this observation?" instead of "what are the odds of this observation assuming I haven't seen the above"? It's not like the P(A|B) formulation prevents people from making that exact mistake. (Citation, I have made that exact mistake.)
1Kicks open the door
Alright, here's the current state of affairs:
- Premise: Bayes Theorem is held up as the most important part of rationality. ACX has the tagline "P(A|B) = [P(A)P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary." Yudkowsky mentions it approximately a million times in the Sequences.
- Premise: The average rationalist cannot use Bayes theorem. No, I will be stronger and more specific: when I ask a room full of people at a LessWrong meetup whether they can write the formula for Bayes Theorem on a piece of paper, less than half of them can.
- Conclusion: Less than half of the rationalist community understands the most important part of rationality.
Or in other words, we suck. Lest anyone think I'm merely throwing stones, I screwed up Bayes the first time I tried to use it in public. I would not bet a lot on me getting any particular problem right. I suck too.
This version though? This I think most people could remember. I can do this version in my head. I've read a half-dozen explainers for Bayes, some with very nice pictures. This beats all of them, and it's in less than two hundred words! Maybe this is a case of Writing A Thousand Roads To Rome where this version happened to click with me but it's fundamentally just as good as many other versions. I suspect this is a simpler formulation.
Either someone needs to point out where this math is wrong, or I'm just going to use this version for myself and for explaining it to others. A much simpler version of the only non-commentary part of rationality seems a worthy use of Best of LessWrong space to me.
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1Isn't learning to gracefully deal with "rude" comments/people just as important a skill as learning to not emit rude comments?
Yeah, but it's generally not the same people who need the other lesson!
I'm thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example.
Yep, I think there's central examples of theft (breaking into someone's house and taking cash out of their wallet), less central examples of theft that are still widely agreed upon to be theft (taking someone's money claiming it's being safeguarded on a trading exchange when actually some of customer funds pay for a bahamas office.)
And what I'm trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.
As long as they're clearly and honestly labeled I disagree, would expect >=7 out of 10 random Americans would also disagree, and though I think you've got the law background and I don't I would expect a court to disagree. Maybe I'm not modeling exactly how social pressure works here?
Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don't think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat.
I am pretty sure (85%) that airplanes do other price discrimination than just seat size. How early the ticket is being booked, how I'm planning to pay for it, whether I often fly with that airplane. I believe they also do a bit of dynamic pricing based on IP address, which is a sneaky way to guess at how much the customer is willing to pay. It annoys me a bit, but as long as they show the price when I'm buying the ticket and honour that price I wouldn't call it stealing.
In the context of organizing a community event, I don't think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don't see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don't know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don't think it's shameful. I'm pretty cheerful in both gift economies and market economies. I don't want to accidentally interact with one like it's the other, so sometimes I ask in various ways what mode we're all in. I'd feel bad if I took advantage of someone's gift to make a bunch of money, and I'd feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money, and so I try to be up front about what I'm doing under which hat. Edit: Eh, "I'd feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money" is a generalization, not true in every particular.
(I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket).
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the update.
But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.
My point is that if the musicians and organizers and speakers are all volunteering, there's at gift being given as well as product being marketed.
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that..
Yep, I'm making a frictionless vacuum spherical cow example.
My guess is the bay solstice organizers aren't sending a tax deduction because the obvious-on-first-pass setup is to set things up like people are buying tickets, but I guess it's plausible the underlying organization is a nonprofit? I know a few SF/F cons that I think have a track for larger donations to count as tax deductible.
Confirming, I used the Submit Linkpost tab then Import Post
How does crossposting something to nominate work? I tried with Thresholding and the system is tracking its date as the date I crossposted, not the date of the original. Reasonable but not great for my purposes. Is there something I'm supposed to do?
Hello and welcome! There's a few of us around who discuss things other than AI research, myself among them. I suggest looking at the filtering options for the front page; it's the gear next to Latest, Enriched, Recommended, and Bookmarks. I filter the AI tag pretty heavily down.
If you want to lean into voicing fringe ideas around here, I'd suggest reading the LessWrong Political Prerequisites and maybe Basics of Rationalist Discourse. They're not universally agreed upon, but I think they do make for a decent pointer to the local standards.
None of the essays I publish got written via stream of consciousness, though sometimes I do it to get ideas or to debug what I think is going wrong with a piece.
Probably some authors are working in a genre where that works for them, or have such a well ordered stream that they can publish what comes out. (hi Scott.) I'm not one of 'em though :)
For a course:
The Guild of the Rose has a bunch of workshops and a skill tree that may be of some use. There also exists the CFAR handbook, though I believe it's formatted on the assumption that it's an aid for a class with a teacher who knows what they're doing. I'm also interested in this problem, and so there's bits and pieces of useful stuff scattered throughout Meetup In A Box in the form of games or activities.
For universities or professors:
It would help to hear a bit more about your goal and use case for them. If you're trying to get a class or club going, it'll help a lot if it's a teacher in a university you're attending or plausibly would attend. If you're looking for classroom material to copy from, you might start with some psych classes; I think a lot of biases get covered there. A bit of statistics or the right probability textbook would also help. If you're looking for help learning the skill of teaching, just about any university will have some advice- it's remarkably transferable. In particular I'd pay attention to public speaking (try toastmasters?) and technical writing classes.
For general advice:
I think it's really useful to have some kind of concrete measurable thing in mind. Start with, say, calibration training and mess around with what helps people get better scores there. You'll be able to notice what works and doesn't work easier since you have a cleaner signal on what works and doesn't.
I also think it's generally easier to meet people where they're at. Minimize the number of interim steps and inferential distance to cross, make it as fun and engaging as possible without losing the important core, pay attention to every point of friction and try to minimize or eliminate it. More people read books or watch Youtube videos than read sprawling sequences of blog posts, and now we have Scout Mindset and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Rational Animations and Robert Miles AI. If I could get a core package of rationality training into high schools I'd jump at that.
That's not observably a majority opinion though.
Best of luck and skill. You're not alone working on the problem.