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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I think the normies are at least partly correct here. I think it's a mistake to say "I don't have a methodology for actually calculating my Baysean priors, but let me put a number on it anyway just to make myself more clear." You are not actually clarifying your position, you are obfuscating it.

In science, the concept of significant figures is extremely important because you have to represent the precision of your knowledge accurately. Lets say I have 1kg of lead and lead has a density of 11342 kg/m3, how many m3 of lead do I have? 1/11342 = .0000881679. Is it accurate to say I have ".0000881679m3" of lead? No, because that's representing an inaccurate degree of precision in my knowledge.

I think people reporting a Baysean prior of "90% confidence" are usually committing the same mistake -- they're misrepresenting the precision of their knowledge. Normies pick up on this and interpret it (correctly) as ludicrous overconfidence.

I do wonder how precisely the human mind can really internally assign confidence, without augmenting it with external tools. If most people can only hold 7 items in working memory, maybe there are just seven buckets of confidence; offering a probability out of 100 just comes off as wildly overconfident, unless you actually show your work. With that understanding, someone saying something will happen is communicating the precision more accurately compared to someone saying they assign a 90% probability to something.

The way to test this is to go around saying, "90% of confidence plus or minus blah blah blah"

If normies intuitively understand significant figures and uncertainty, the blah blah amount will influence their reaction.

If normies are disgusted by numbers and wanna-be-economists, then the uncertainty wouldn't ever matter.

90% of confidence plus or minus blah blah blah

Unless you are using some transparent methodology to calculate the confidence interval, this is even worse than just saying 90% because you are now claiming to know both your priors and the uncertainty of your priors with high levels of precision.

The normie can, and probably will, also doubt how accurately your confidence interval is calculated.

(And that assumes a normie who understands the term. Intuitively understanding X is not the same as understanding all the terms used to describe X.)

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