site banner
Gillitrut  Reading from the golden book under bright red stars  1yr ago (link.springer.com)   Edited 1yr ago   1592 thread views

Pay no attention to the Model Behind the Curtain!

link.springer.com

Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers—but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little connection to the real-world phenomena they purport to explain. Common steps in modeling to support policy decisions, such as putting disparate things on the same scale, may conflict with reality. Not all costs and benefits can be put on the same scale, not all uncertainties can be expressed as probabilities, and not all model parameters measure what they purport to measure. These ideas are illustrated with examples from seismology, wind-turbine bird deaths, soccer penalty cards, gender bias in academia, and climate policy.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Most people believe in deontological constraints in addition to value maximization, so even if they thought that saving lives were infinitely valuable, they wouldn’t necessarily force others to try to do so

Yes, exactly. "The value of a soul" and "deontological considerations about forced conversion" are wildly different things that they are comparing, just like the author of this paper would assert is "quantifauxcation."

Making decisions about which thing to prioritize doesn’t require them to be comparable. There is a vast philosophical literature about decision theory involving incompatibilities, exactly none of which affirms that we can never rationally choose one incomparable thing over the other.

This sounds like a quibble over definitions. I would consider any decision between X and Y to constitute a comparison between them, by the common definition of the word "compare." You don't have to agree with that definition, but it seems like you do agree that people regularly decide between 2 things that are extremely different from each other, just like it is totally valid to say something like "the average person would decides to take X dollars in exchange for an increase of Y to their risk of death."

Lots of probabilities are a priori and hence independent of empirical measurements.

I think you're making a very, very different argument than was made in the original paper. Which is fine, but it's not really relevant to my argument. The probability you gave is exactly 1/pi, yes. As far as I can tell, this is is unrelated to the claim that the use of probabilities for complex problems is inappropriate because you lack sufficient information to calculate a probability. As far as I know, no one says something like "the completely precise probability of conflict in the Korean peninsula this year is 5 + pi/50 percent." That's just a strawman.

What you are asserting about mathematical truth is a highly contested position in the philosophy of mathematics, and it’s not clear to me that it’s even coherent.

I don't think most logicians would tell you there's a definitive answer to the question, "Is the axiom of choice true?" Or, perhaps an even better example, the continuum hypothesis. But again, I don't think any of this is relevant to the claims being made in the paper. I guess you think that some of what I wrote isn't literally true, if interpreted in a different context than this thread?

Perhaps our disagreement about comparability is merely verbal, but for future reference your usage of the term is widely divergent from most philosophical treatments of "comparability" in value theory (e.g. see here), so you may want to change it to avoid confusion in the future.

I think you're making a very, very different argument than was made in the original paper. Which is fine, but it's not really relevant to my argument.

As I said before, I think that your argument drew far more general conclusions than simply the negations of the paper's conclusions, so I disagree.

As far as I know, no one says something like "the completely precise probability of conflict in the Korean peninsula this year is 5 + pi/50 percent." That's just a strawman.

Well, I don't think that anyone says "the completely precise probability of X is Y" about much of anything, because people usually don't work with completely exact probabilities at all. Which I take to be among the claims of the paper.

I don't think most logicians would tell you there's a definitive answer to the question, "Is the axiom of choice true?"

That is completely different from saying that it makes no sense to draw conclusions about what would follow if it were true, like values of conditional probabilities, which mathematicians and logicians do all the time.

Perhaps our disagreement about comparability is merely verbal, but for future reference your usage of the term is widely divergent from most philosophical treatments of "comparability" in value theory (e.g. see here), so you may want to change it to avoid confusion in the future.

The author is a statistician, not a philosopher, and based on what I was responding to I think what I said makes sense. Maybe you should assume more common definitions instead of esoteric ones, and explain in advance that you are using such an obscure meaning, unless the context is highly specific. I'm certainly not going to warp how I use words around some academics' redefinition.

Your link is paywalled, so I can't really comment on it.

Well, I don't think that anyone says "the completely precise probability of X is Y" about much of anything, because people usually don't work with completely exact probabilities at all. Which I take to be among the claims of the paper.

That's not how I read it. The author said that the entire notion of probability is inapplicable in situations where you lack the information to calculate an exact probability, as you would with a fair coin or fair die.

That is completely different from saying that it makes no sense to draw conclusions about what would follow if it were true, like values of conditional probabilities, which mathematicians and logicians do all the time.

You can certainly discuss what consequences the axiom of choice implies. My point was that if your position about real-world empirical work (or even pure mathematics) depends on whether the AoC "is true" then you have most likely lost the plot. A statement like "if the axiom of choice, then probability is inapplicable in many real world scenarios, but if not AoC, then it is applicable" is almost certainly wrong.

I don’t think that my definition is any more obscure than your personal usage of the term. I’ve never heard anyone else use the term like you do, whereas my usage at least conforms to an extant literature. Here’s a sci-hub link to that paper, sorry, it wasn’t paywalled for me: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/339673?

Lots of empirical work depends upon a background mathematical framework. Statistics is no different. And I never said that probability wasn’t applicable if the AoC is true, all I said was that the AoC would have to be absolutely, determinately false if every uncertainty is to be reducible to precise probabilities.

I don’t think that my definition is any more obscure than your personal usage of the term. I’ve never heard anyone else use the term like you do, whereas my usage at least conforms to an extant literature. Here’s a sci-hub link to that paper, sorry, it wasn’t paywalled for me: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/339673?

This is not "my personal usage", this is just what the word means in English, and how it's used all the time.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/compare

"to examine (two or more objects, ideas, people, etc.) in order to note similarities and differences"

Lots of empirical work depends upon a background mathematical framework. Statistics is no different. And I never said that probability wasn’t applicable if the AoC is true,

Lots of empirical work depends on the mathematical framework, but the axiom of choice is not one that should be very relevant.

all I said was that the AoC would have to be absolutely, determinately false if every uncertainty is to be reducible to precise probabilities.

Again, I think you're making an entirely different claim to the one that was in the paper, but using similar terminology in a way that's confusing.

Then I don’t understand what you meant in saying that the environment and culture will turn out to be non-comparable given what the paper says. What would it even mean to not be able to examine them for similarities and differences? On your definition, it is just trivially true that everything is comparable.

The axiom of choice is a central part of set theory, which is used to axiomatize all the rest of mathematics. I see no basis for thinking it should be irrelevant to any particular part of mathematics, unless that part is entirely constructive, which statistics in general is not.

I was reacting to the claims that you made in response to the paper, not the paper alone.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats