I put an estimate on one calibration question that I knew was wrong. In hindsight I shouldn’t have done that. The mistake: I don’t know what bone is the longest in the body, but I knew that. So I put down a random answer for that question. But then I felt like it would be cheating on the calibration to put 0% after an intentionally wrong answer, so I put a higher number that wasn’t accurate. My mistake, but other people might have done something similar.
I want the political questions to measure the importance of an issue on next year’s survey.
If you put down a random answer and know you did, then it seems like the correct estimate for your calibration would be 1 over the size of the sample space. Google tells me there are 206 bones in the adult human body, but a lot them are mirrored left to right, so maybe you’d be looking at something just south of 1%?
Probably higher, though, if you filtered out the many small bones in e.g. the fingers and toes, or the vertebrae.
Even then your subjective probability wouldn’t have been exactly 0. You could have put 0.00000000001 or something like that. The instructions didn’t forbid you from using long decimals. Even so, I think it would have been fine to put 0 if your subjective probability really was 0 or you felt like rounding down to it.
If you think that the probability that we’ve all been lied to about this (the relative sizes of the bones in the human body) might be as high as 0.5%, then you live in a more interesting world than I do.
Unless you just mean that you checked Wikipedia, and somebody who knowingly puts a false statement on Wikipedia (a public website) is technically lying to everybody, and you didn’t check the references or even the edit history, so you were unsure whether the probability of having found such a false statement was higher or lower than 0.5%, then … well then I still think that that’s much too high!
(Edits: precise phrasing of stuff about technical lying.)
Well it gets really murky as to what constitutes lying if we’re in a simulation, which is more probable than 0.005 by far. What if there were historic humans, but you’re just a virtual facsimile of one? Is that a “we were lied to about our bones”-scenario? And so on. That’s mostly what I was pondering.
Well, the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation. You may not have bones that exist in the universe outside the simulation, but you still have “bones” within the simulation. The name “bone” as well as the names for specific bones would be accurate if those are the agreed-upon names within your simulated culture. Whether the bones need to physically exist in the most fundamental level of reality in order to be considered bones seems like an argument over semantics. They still possess the other typical characteristics of bones that our culture has decided bones are supposed to possess. In everyday practice, people assign objects to linguistic categories based on resemblance to a prototypical example, not by making sure they fulfill a list of necessary criteria.
Oh, I agree that “the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation”. Likely so, in fact, which is why we go down all the way to 0.005 from P(we all live in a grand ol’ simulation, in a simulation, in a simulation).
The whole survey was full of definitional quibbles. What is ‘supernatural’ etc.
Largest is ambiguous. It could mean longest, or largest volume (with or without counting the volume enclosed, if we’re talking about the skull), or even heaviest.
I put an estimate on one calibration question that I knew was wrong. In hindsight I shouldn’t have done that. The mistake: I don’t know what bone is the longest in the body, but I knew that. So I put down a random answer for that question. But then I felt like it would be cheating on the calibration to put 0% after an intentionally wrong answer, so I put a higher number that wasn’t accurate. My mistake, but other people might have done something similar.
I want the political questions to measure the importance of an issue on next year’s survey.
If you put down a random answer and know you did, then it seems like the correct estimate for your calibration would be 1 over the size of the sample space. Google tells me there are 206 bones in the adult human body, but a lot them are mirrored left to right, so maybe you’d be looking at something just south of 1%?
Probably higher, though, if you filtered out the many small bones in e.g. the fingers and toes, or the vertebrae.
You’re assuming the answer I wrote down was an accurate name of a bone.
Even then your subjective probability wouldn’t have been exactly 0. You could have put 0.00000000001 or something like that. The instructions didn’t forbid you from using long decimals. Even so, I think it would have been fine to put 0 if your subjective probability really was 0 or you felt like rounding down to it.
The question was about the largest bone, not the longest bone.
Tomayto, tomahto. Comes out to the same. Which is good, since the question would be ambiguous otherwise.
Wasn’t sure whether to round to 100 or to 99. After all, we could all have been lied to.
If you think that the probability that we’ve all been lied to about this (the relative sizes of the bones in the human body) might be as high as 0.5%, then you live in a more interesting world than I do.
Unless you just mean that you checked Wikipedia, and somebody who knowingly puts a false statement on Wikipedia (a public website) is technically lying to everybody, and you didn’t check the references or even the edit history, so you were unsure whether the probability of having found such a false statement was higher or lower than 0.5%, then … well then I still think that that’s much too high!
(Edits: precise phrasing of stuff about technical lying.)
Well it gets really murky as to what constitutes lying if we’re in a simulation, which is more probable than 0.005 by far. What if there were historic humans, but you’re just a virtual facsimile of one? Is that a “we were lied to about our bones”-scenario? And so on. That’s mostly what I was pondering.
Well, the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation. You may not have bones that exist in the universe outside the simulation, but you still have “bones” within the simulation. The name “bone” as well as the names for specific bones would be accurate if those are the agreed-upon names within your simulated culture. Whether the bones need to physically exist in the most fundamental level of reality in order to be considered bones seems like an argument over semantics. They still possess the other typical characteristics of bones that our culture has decided bones are supposed to possess. In everyday practice, people assign objects to linguistic categories based on resemblance to a prototypical example, not by making sure they fulfill a list of necessary criteria.
Oh, I agree that “the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation”. Likely so, in fact, which is why we go down all the way to 0.005 from P(we all live in a grand ol’ simulation, in a simulation, in a simulation).
The whole survey was full of definitional quibbles. What is ‘supernatural’ etc.
Largest is ambiguous. It could mean longest, or largest volume (with or without counting the volume enclosed, if we’re talking about the skull), or even heaviest.
Not that i knew the answer, but I assumed that of course it meant the heaviest. I don’t seem to have much company in this!
I think it means largest volume without counting the volume enclosed.
That’s what I thought too, and apparently I was wrong...