dthunt

I've done this for an hour or so on occasion. I don't find it a particular strain. I may be doing something different than what you are doing, though.

When I meditate, I usually notice my feet, for example. I notice my feet if I get a little bit jittery, and for me that's sufficient to cut a lot of the whammy out of strong emotion, agitation, moderate amounts of panic, pain.

I haven't noticed increased concentration skills, except as could be wholly explained by learning the skill "calm down on demand", but I'm not willing to write off that as a possibility without testing (a little late for me to test on myself, anyway!)

Name the next plausible explanation and how likely you think it is relative to 'save money, screw your data'. I think you'll have takers on a bet at those odds, given what you just said.

Retracted then. I hadn't noticed that.

Probably not training "matching", given that there is no place where you indicate what the correct thing was.

It could be gathering data about how people draw shapes in general, but it's not immediately obvious to me how much that can help.

Well, he's ALLEGED to have done that.

People are becoming increasingly interested in the case because it's looking probable that enforcement/prosecution has done something untoward.

Everybody has an interest in law enforcement operating under the rules that supposed to constrain its behavior.

If the prosecution can straight up lie to the court about how evidence is gathered with impunity, then at the very least it may be an effective strategy to raise the cost of effective defense.

More scarily, it may be used to cover up useful lines of defense.

In every case, you should imagine an innocent man accused, and consider whether the tactics used against him are designed to demonstrate the truth, to cast artifacts in a false light, or to raise the odds of conviction regardless of the truth.

We should never convict on the strength of the information that someone has been charged.

It may help to rewrite those in your head to, "as an experienced systems administrator who knows how these particular config files work" or perhaps "how config files work in general".

These are all questions of basic fact and they are all easily testable.

What do courts do when this situation comes up? Do they play warring experts, when (at least) one side definitely wants to perform a test, because they are confident that their interpretation is correct?

(ed: 'questions of basic fact' like, whether a server with this configuration is hittable from non-allowed IPs)

I am a strong advocate of the following principle:

Defeat your enemies.

Rackspace deserves some big props, here. More should follow their example.

It seems really unlikely to me that they would have set up this system the incredibly dumb way.

The end result is that the public doesn't know about the rule, so they see psychologists acting a certain way and frequently think it's actually epistemically bad, or impossible, to reason about the mental states of other humans based on their actions, writings, and other artifacts.

Imagine if computer security experts couldn't talk, in general, about the security of a line of products offered by a company, or about the probable cause of a specific issue that had been observed in a particular product.

The parallels ARE actually there; it's not as strange an analogy as it looks at first glance.

I understand some of the reasons the rule exists. I think this is probably not the best solution, in that it creates a public who have very strange ideas about psychiatry, and that is actually a great harm.

I'm neutral on most of this article, but like, specifically, if public perception is an issue, finding a better way to resolve the ethical dilemma that spawned the Goldwater Rule sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

APA should ditch the Goldwater rule.

If you ask people to estimate the number of protons inside the sun, you might develop a peak around some sorts of numbers, but it's not likely to be a particularly good estimate.

I am going to challenge that belief by asking you to do the following:

Try solving the blue and red pots problem, given only a single observation.

Now try again, this time with two observations.

If you can find that, provide a link. I strongly doubt people are particularly good (without applying some sort of rigor) at estimating beans in jars.

They're hypothetical inferences, but the downside to using actual realistic examples is that even when they're meticulously researched, people nitpick them to a degree that baffles me. Like, asserting "but the probability of the evidence is either 0 or 1, so it's clearly impossible to ever make any inferential reasoning work".

The examples here are well chosen to eliminate the usual attacks on inference. They're ODD. But they're not invalid.

Not only cheated, but also destroyed an opportunity to learn something valuable.

GP can, however, take other calibration tests elsewhere.

Here is one: http://calibratedprobabilityassessment.org/

Don't cheat this time. There is a valuable lesson here.

Yes.

The problems absolutely illustrate the concept if you have a reliable overconfidence confidence bias. You do not need a background in psychology to understand "Hey, I feel 90% confidence, but am being surprised nearly 1 in 3 times. There's some kind of miscalibration going on there."

Yeah, this is a fair criticism. There are explicit bounds encoded in each problem and when those conflict with your estimates, you will be frustrated.

Haven't got a frigging clue isn't a fair thing to say though. The whole point of the exercise is that most people have a significant misalignment going on between their modelling of reality and the track record of their modelling ability.

Exercises like figuring out how much milk a cow produces in a week or how fast a horse runs require you to consider what information you DO have suggests about upper and lower bounds and things like that, and then correctly realizing the confidence of your models is the other half of the equation.

You are pretty sure, I would imagine, that a cow doesn't produce 10,000 gallons of milk in a week. You are pretty sure that a 'heavy' user of a vending machine might use three a day and buy a bunch of snacks and a drink or two, and that 'heavy' users maximally represent Y% of the population, with high confidence.

You can use these intuitions to guide your estimates, and you do in fact do so on a regular basis. The exercise is calibrating those estimates against their empirical accuracy.

There is no graduation ceremony.

It probably would have been a lot smarter to post this somewhere inside the continental US.

Police organizations don't seem to be particularly good at learning lessons from these sorts of mishaps.

I heard a story a number of years ago in Silver Spring, MD, about how the police were confused by a large marijuana delivery they intercepted to an unwitting person's address, who was arrested, and would have been charged and likely convicted under the circumstances. It turns out the driver was the intended recipient, which they discovered the very next week when another delivery was intercepted at the warehouse, with the driver in common.

This isn't an uncommon tale.

And yet, barely a few years later, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor'..., with the key result of the sheriff declaring, despite the killing of the mayor's two dogs after breaching the door, "We'd do it again. Tonight."

Cautionary tales like this should spread like wildfire, but it appears that perhaps they do not, or LEA are rather immovable with respect to their suspicions.

(and apparently I know very little about the relationship between cities and law enforcement in Maryland; it's more complicated than I thought)

Oh, part of that explanation assumes you know how to use Bayes' Theorem. If you don't, this doesn't look like a simple explanation, it probably looks like the ravings of a madman because I'm assuming you know a few of the properties and common manipulations of the formula.

The full text of a draft version is out there, actually.

I bought my copy, though. :)

Look. I'll explain it really simple. He's saying it has to be > 0, because he is unwilling to rule out ESP as a logical possibility. If he assigned it 0, no matter how good the experimental design was, and no matter what the test was, he would be unmovable from this position. 0 is forbidden if you want to accept it as a possibility. This is why he says this. He also is being honest about his appraisal of the general likelihood of ESP. It's very low. He doesn't bother to explain how low because it turns out it's IRRELEVANT.

You literally have to believe ESP is the most likely explanation among all the usual alternatives ALREADY in order to think it was ESP after ingesting the data, because the data in this test is not EVIDENCE for ESP, because P(E|sort of works ESP) and P(E|one of the assistants wore glasses and Stewart could see some reflections) or whatever your remotely plausible alternative - all look pretty identical.

It is not evidence, in the sense that you cannot do 500, 37,100, or a 1 million card guessing attempts in this setup with this level of detail and expect it to shift belief of a rational agent. The ratio between the priors of the usual suspects is going to look the same as your ratio of posteriors between all the hypotheses after the test.

In order to convince someone of ESP rationally, you need to demonstrate that it is extremely difficult to cheat under the test conditions, in the sense that P(E|trickery) goes down.

Your alternative theory ISN'T the null hypothesis. It's a garden variety non-magical trickster, which exist in great numbers, whereas nobody has yet seen even a single instance of ESP as it is normally meant.

It's actually not a problem. You can come up with any number of hypotheses about coins. Some of them take the form, "This coin will produce <some specific output> in the next 1000 typical flips". That hypothesis and others with similar, more complex form, like the pair of hypotheses that predict flip 1001 after the same first 1000, GAIN CREDENCE when you perform 1000 flips that conform to them. Others of the similar form lose it. Other hypotheses of wildly different construction, like, that a coin is more or less fair, lose and gain credence according to whether or not they predict the observed result.

The fact that you didn't write a hypothesis down before you did the test has very little to do with whether or not the data supports the hypothesis. Hindsight bias matters, but only as far as it corrupts your experience. The machine with the infinite library of coin-flip-hypotheses updates just fine.

On a side note, coins are not fair, in general, and Jaynes actually goes into some detail about the process of cheating at coin flips.

I very much like the way he lays out the groundwork. It answers fairly directly a lot of criticisms I've seen leveled at probability.

Really? Do you actually think that Jaynes is being unreasonable when he assigns ESP a prior that is lower than "has some sort of trick" or some other thing that generally turns out to be the explanatory factor for a magician?

He's saying that ESP is an unlikely explanation. He's saying that it is Probably Something Else. The experimental data cannot distinguish them. That's why it's not compelling. It has very little to do with rationalization. It's a terrible test.

Remember that you're trading a fixed amount of happiness here for some sort of return (which might be less than the happiness than you sacrifice).

What sort of happiness trades are you willing to make at that price? Intelligence that measures as a 15 IQ point boost? 5 million dollars? Everything's got a price. At some point, sacrificing those things IS worth the return.

Doing pretty well at basic reasoning skills has a lot to do with good decisionmaking, in that it's required.

However, if you know that, and can put a price on your naive happiness, you can make a choice about whether you'd like to develop skills that will help you in a large number of areas of your life.

So, yes. Sacrifice that naive happiness. Sacrifice your willingness to believe things merely because you want them to be true. Sacrifice your false confidence. Use your better aim to set a wiser course.