It is fashionable, on LessWrong and also everywhere else, to advocate for a transition away from p-values. p-values have many known issues. p-hacking is possible and difficult to prevent, testing one hypothesis at a time cannot even in principle be correct, et cetera. I should mention here, because I will...
TL;DR * One major obstacle to interpretability is that complicated neural nets don't tell you where or how they're representing important concepts, and methods to find these representations are imperfect. * This problem is less present in simple neural networks, so one natural idea is to initialize a complicated neural...
For example the “Poor and Proud” and “March 4 Hundredaires” signs are sentiments that literally every Pro-Billionaire protestor would gladly endorse
See https://x.com/twocents/status/2020596821228388704
In particular, note the following exchange
> Interviewer: "Is there any ways you would restructure current incentives to make, to allow for, the protestors and the antiprotestors to like see eye-to-eye?"
> Pro-Billionaire Protestor: "I don't want to see eye to eye with them! I want to destroy them. [cut, apparently to later in the same answer] All manner of socialists and communists that are motivated by jealousy, I want to wipe them off (pause) of the political spectrum. I want to make it (pause) not allowed for you to support this."
There's a cut here, perhaps there's some intervening context that changes the conclusion I should draw from this exchange, but I really very strongly doubt it.
Not at all. There is no such set of characteristics. Wrong conclusions are inevitable and commonplace. Godel's Theorems apply to all formalisms.
They do not apply to all formalisms, morality is not a formal system, and even if it were this is not what either of Godel's theorems would say about it. I don't know why this particular bit of math misunderstanding is so popular online, I suspect it's because it enables moves like the one you're making here (i.e. of the form "it's impossible to justify any statement so I can't be expected to justify my statements").
... (read more)In the current world, the harm of unsanctioned killing being commonly accepted (and
"is it ok to kill people (or call for the killing or support the killing) who have not been convicted by any court and the killing does not stop any immediate physical threat to you?"
When you phrase the question like this, do you think that you've identified a set of characteristics that, throughout history, will never lead to the wrong conclusion? Or are you making a heuristic argument?
I think that throughout history, there have probably been many "ok" killings against people who did not present an immediate threat to the killer and had not been convicted by any court. I think that even today there are probably such killings. Do you have an argument against that position or do you think that, by phrasing things in the way you have, you've implicitly made a sufficient argument already?
(This is not to say that the UHC CEO killing in particular was justified, of course.)
I mostly agree with this, principled and robust estimations of effect size are hard and also important. Maybe someday I'll write a primer on Judea Pearl covering Bayesian networks and causal graphs, which in my mind is the framework that unifies these approaches, but that would take me a while and would require some more research, so I didn't get into it here.
By calling something the "p-value" you are elevating the null hypothesis to a special status
Of course when you call something a p-value you should in your mind add "(for a particular choice of null hypothesis)", calling something "the" p-value doesn't really make sense. But I don't think it's correct to say that this elevates the null hypothesis to a special status; in many (perhaps even most) cases, there's a hypothesis which already has special status, and addressing that hypothesis in particular is productive in a way that cataloguing and grouping several alternate hypotheses is not.
(and usually leaving various things about it underspecified)
This is precisely the opposite of the truth. As I tried... (read 487 more words →)
Bayesian reasoning does work fine here, but if you were trying to communicate how you changed your mind about the original hypothesis, you wouldn't report all your updates, because you wouldn't (and shouldn't) go through the process of enumerating all of the alternatives you considered and the likelihoods under those alternatives and your priors and justifying an estimate of the likelihood under alternatives like "or something I haven't thought of". If you're interested in a distinguished hypothesis, which you almost always are (hypotheses like "this intervention has no effect" or "the normal explanation of how this process works is correct" are basically always available), then the most important thing you should report is the probability of the evidence under that distinguished hypothesis, since the updates on that hypothesis should agree even if the auxiliary updates do not and that's the hypothesis your peers will tend to care about the most.
You can communicate the same thing in a bayesian fashion, you just need to specify the class of hypothesis you are declaring the "null hypothesis".
Yes this is what a p-value is? Perhaps I am confused, are you saying something here that I'm not saying? (Although note that we cannot perform an update this way, we need conditional probabilities for the evidence under both the hypothesis under consideration and its complement.)
... (read more)Yes, of course any bayesian analysis will need to require creating classes of hypotheses and assigning odds-ratios to them. So does doing any kind of analysis with p-values, it's just that with p-values you are elevating one such class of hypotheses to a
It is fashionable, on LessWrong and also everywhere else, to advocate for a transition away from p-values. p-values have many known issues. p-hacking is possible and difficult to prevent, testing one hypothesis at a time cannot even in principle be correct, et cetera. I should mention here, because I will not mention it again, that these critiques are correct and very important - people are not wrong to notice these problems and I don't intend to dismiss them. Furthermore, it’s true that a perfect reasoner is a Bayesian reasoner, so why would we ever use an evaluative approach in science that can’t be extended into an ideal reasoning pattern?
Consider the following scenario:... (read 897 more words →)
I think our mental models here might be different enough that it's hard for me to understand what you're saying here. By nonlinearity here I mean that, in addition to nonlinear interactions between drugs, there are interacting systems, equilibration mechanisms, etc., to the point that I think intuitions about ML systems basically shouldn't transfer at all. But then I know your intuitions about ML are better than mine, so it's hard to be sure of that.
Re: interactions specifically, this definitely isn't true in polypharmacy situations. We know most of the bad drug pairs in the normal population, and because doctors are wary of prescribing many different medications, this means we rarely encounter... (read more)
A huge percentage of the job of a pharmacist is to keep track of potential negative interactions between different drugs, of which there are an incomprehensible number. I don't think linearity is a reasonable assumption here, the interaction terms between multiple interventions should be though of as, on average, big. Augmentation and synergistic effects exist, but are in general risky and quite hard to find. Even the effects of one drug are not linear, there are significant nonlinearities in dosage effects for most drugs.
Reads more as manic than rehearsed to me, but I'm not sure I see how the distinction matters. Usually I assume that if somebody has thought through what they want to say before they say it, they're more likely to give their real thoughts as a result, as opposed to some reactively oppositional take. I guess there's the Andy Kaufman defense?
(I guess I should mention, there's at least one way that the distinction is relevant here. At the first pause I indicated, it seems like they were about to say that they want their political opponents wiped off of the face of the earth, but catch themself in time to moderate... (read more)