Superforecaster, social science, metascience, data science. USA & Canada.
On Twitter or BlueSky you’d find me @thatMikeBishop
Mike Bishop
Karma: 658
Researchers should 1) survey participants regarding their possible exposure risks, and 2) ask them whether they think they got the placebo, and with what degree of confidence. Adjusting for these should reduce the problem.
This postmortem is so impressive. Someone should collect all the pandemic related postmortems. I’d be particularly interested in those written by people in the field (broadly construed).
Note: the CDC now recommends public mask-wearing, even DIY cloth masks, (reversing their previous advice): https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/diy-cloth-face-coverings.html
Please promote #Masks4All wherever you can: https://twitter.com/thatMikeBishop/status/1251609042860023814
Is this more (or less) comfortable than cloth masks? I support any/all masks but my inclination is to focus on whatever we can get people to adopt. I doubt I’m doing what I can, including tweeting #Masks4All once per day https://twitter.com/thatMikeBishop/status/1246501797512056834
You have experience wearing a mask like above and are telling us it’s awful to wear more than 30 minutes?
Is there any reason to worry copper tape might be less effective than the copper used in experiments? (I haven’t read methods to see if they describe the source of the copper) For example, a lot of copper is designed to be resistant to oxidation—does that matter?
[UPDATED, thanks to various people who caught errors in V1 and pointed out V2] New NIH study of COVID half-life in aerosol or on surfaces V1 with errors: https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1 , V2 hopefully error free: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf (H/T @AndyBioTech)
2.4-5.11 hours on copper, in contrast to 10.5-16.1 on steel or 13-19.2 on plastic
What does it mean for a probability not to be well defined in this context? I mean, I think I share the intuition, but I’m not really comfortable with it either. Doesn’t it seem strange that a probability could be well defined until I start learning more about it and trying to change it? How little do I have to care about the probability before it becomes well defined again?
+1 and many thanks for wading into this with me… I’ve been working all day and I’m still at work so can’t necessarily respond in full...
I agree that these problems are a lot simpler if reducing my uncertainty about X cannot help me affect X. This is not a minor class of problems. I’d love to have better information for a lot of problems in this class. That said, many of the problems that it seems most worthwhile for me to spend my time and money reducing my uncertainty about are of the type where I have a non-trivial role in how they play out. Assuming I do have some causal power over X, I think I’d pay a lot more to know the “equilibrium” probability of X after I’ve digested the information the oracle gave me—anything else seems like stale information… but learning that equilibrium probability seems weird as well. If I’m surprised by what the oracle says, then I imagine I’d ask myself questions like: how am I likely to react in regard to this information… what was the probability before I knew this information such that the current probability is what it is… It feels like I’m losing freedom… to what extent is the experience of uncertainty tied to the experience of freedom?
The Value of Uncertainty Reduction—references to academic literature appreciated
Seeking examples of people smarter than me who got hung up
hmmm, I guess I missed that. Should I remove this post?
Test your forecasting ability, contribute to the science of human judgment
Economist Jeff Ely recently blogged an interesting example of a slippery slope. http://cheaptalk.org/2012/03/27/the-slippery-slope/
Woh, I did allow myself to misread/misremember your initial comment a bit so I’ll dial it back slightly. The fact that even at the highest levels IQ is still positively correlated to income is important, and its what I would have expected, so the overall story does not undermine my support for the hypothesis that at the highest IQ levels, higher IQ individuals produce more positive externalities. I apologize for getting a bit sloppy there.
I would guess that if you had data from people with the same job description at the same company the correlation between IQ, patents, and income would be even higher.
I wonder whether there’s a correlation between depression and being conflict averse. I would guess that there is, and I’m sure there has been at least some academic study of it. This doesn’t really address the issue, but its related.
I also think that keeping a blog or writing in odd corners of the internet may be associated with, possibly even caused by, depression.
Let me put it this way. Before considering the Terman data on patents you presented, I already thought IQ would be positively correlated with producing positive externalities and that there was a mostly one way causal link from the former to the latter. I expected the correlation between patents and IQ. What was new to me was the lack of correlation between IQ and income, and the lack of correlation between patents and income. Correction added: there was actually a fairly strong correlation between IQ and income, just not between income and patents, (conditional on IQ I think). Surely more productive industrial researchers are generally paid more. Many firms even give explicit bonuses on a per patent basis. So for me, given my priors, the Terman data you presented shifts me slightly against correction: does not shift me for or against the hypothesis that at the highest IQ levels, higher IQ individuals continues to be associated with producing more positive externalities. ref Still, I think increasing people’s IQ, even the already gifted, probably has strong positive externalities unless the method for increasing it also has surprising (to me) side-effects.
I agree that measuring open-source contributions requires more than merely counting lines of code written. But I did want to highlight the fact that the patent system is explicitly designed to increase the private returns for a given innovation. I don’t think that there is a strong correlation between the companies/industries which are patenting the most, and the companies/industries, which are benefiting the world the most.
It seems someone should link up “Why and How to Debate Charitably.” I can’t find a copy of the original because the author has taken it down. Here is a discussion of it on LW.. Here are my bulleted summary quotes. ADDED: Original essay I’ve just learned, and am very saddened to hear, that the author, Chris, committed suicide some time ago.
On its own, I don’t consider this strong evidence for the greater productivity of the IQ elite. If they were contributions to open-source projects, that would be one thing. But people doing work that generates patents which don’t lead to higher income—that raises some questions for me. Is it possible that extremely high IQ is associated with a tendency to become “addicted” to a game like patenting? Added: I think Gwern and I agree more than many people might think reading this comment.
Thanks for looking into this. Did you happen to model this in log-odds space?