I have the impression the OP is using “gambler’s fallacy” as a conventional term for a strategy, while you are taking “fallacy” to mean “something’s wrong”. The OP does write about this contrast, e.g., in the conclusion:
Maybe the gambler’s fallacy doesn’t reveal statistical incompetence at all. After all, it’s exactly what we’d expect from a rational sensitivity to both causal uncertainty and subtle statistical cues.
So I think the adversative backbone of your comment is misdirected.
I agree with that characterization, but I think it’s still warranted to make the argument because (a) OP isn’t exactly clear about it, and (b) saying “maybe the title of my post isn’t exactly true” near the end doesn’t remove the impact of the title. I mean this isn’t some kind of exotic effect; it’s the most central way in which people come to believe silly things about science: someone writes about a study in a way that’s maybe sort of true but misleading, and people come away believing something false. Even on LW, the number of people who read just the headline and fill in the rest is probably larger than the number of people who read the post.
This seems like a difficult situation because they need to refer to the particular way-of-betting that they are talking about, and the common name for that way-of-betting is “the gambler’s fallacy”, and so they can’t avoid the implication that this way-of-betting is based on fallacious reasoning except by identifying the way-of-betting in some less-recognizable way, which trades off against other principles of good communication.
I suppose they could insert the phrase “so-called”. i.e. “Bayesians commit the so-called Gambler’s Fallacy”. (That still funges against the virtue of brevity, though not exorbitantly.)
But the point of the post is to use that as a simplified model of a more general phenomenon, that should cling to your notions connected to “gambler’s fallacy”.
A title like yours is more technically defensible and closer to the math, but it renounces an important part. The bolder claim is actually there and intentional.
It reminds me of a lot of academic papers where it’s very difficult to see what all that math is there for.
To be clear, I second making the title less confident. I think your suggestion exceeds in the other direction. It omits content.
Are “switchy” and “streaky” accepted terms-of-art? I wasn’t previously familiar with them and my attempts to Google them mostly lead back to this exact paper, which makes me think this paper probably coined them.
Yeah, I definitely did not think they’re standard terms, but they’re pretty expressive. I mean, you can use terms-that-you-define-in-the-post in the title.
I have the impression the OP is using “gambler’s fallacy” as a conventional term for a strategy, while you are taking “fallacy” to mean “something’s wrong”. The OP does write about this contrast, e.g., in the conclusion:
So I think the adversative backbone of your comment is misdirected.
I agree with that characterization, but I think it’s still warranted to make the argument because (a) OP isn’t exactly clear about it, and (b) saying “maybe the title of my post isn’t exactly true” near the end doesn’t remove the impact of the title. I mean this isn’t some kind of exotic effect; it’s the most central way in which people come to believe silly things about science: someone writes about a study in a way that’s maybe sort of true but misleading, and people come away believing something false. Even on LW, the number of people who read just the headline and fill in the rest is probably larger than the number of people who read the post.
I strong downvote any post in which the title is significantly more clickbaity than warranted by the evidence in the post. Including this one.
This seems like a difficult situation because they need to refer to the particular way-of-betting that they are talking about, and the common name for that way-of-betting is “the gambler’s fallacy”, and so they can’t avoid the implication that this way-of-betting is based on fallacious reasoning except by identifying the way-of-betting in some less-recognizable way, which trades off against other principles of good communication.
I suppose they could insert the phrase “so-called”. i.e. “Bayesians commit the so-called Gambler’s Fallacy”. (That still funges against the virtue of brevity, though not exorbitantly.)
What would you have titled this result?
With ~2 min of thought, “Uniform distributions provide asymmetrical evidence against switchy and streaky priors”
But the point of the post is to use that as a simplified model of a more general phenomenon, that should cling to your notions connected to “gambler’s fallacy”.
A title like yours is more technically defensible and closer to the math, but it renounces an important part. The bolder claim is actually there and intentional.
It reminds me of a lot of academic papers where it’s very difficult to see what all that math is there for.
To be clear, I second making the title less confident. I think your suggestion exceeds in the other direction. It omits content.
Are “switchy” and “streaky” accepted terms-of-art? I wasn’t previously familiar with them and my attempts to Google them mostly lead back to this exact paper, which makes me think this paper probably coined them.
Yeah, I definitely did not think they’re standard terms, but they’re pretty expressive. I mean, you can use terms-that-you-define-in-the-post in the title.