VincentYu

• VincentYuDec 1, 2015, 5:33 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Still can’t get it. I should be able to access it through an institutional subscription to the EBSCO database once the paper is assigned to an issue, replacing its current “online first” designation.

• VincentYuDec 1, 2015, 3:52 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 30 - Dec. 06, 2015

  Nice paper.

  p. 558 (Study 4):

  Participants also completed a ten item personality scale (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003) [the TIPI; an alternative is Rammstedt and John’s BFI-10] that indexes individual differences in the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness). These data will not be considered further.

  It’s strange not to say why the data will not be considered further. The data are available, the reduction is clean, but the keys look a bit too skeletal given that copies of the orignal surveys don’t seem to be available (perhaps because Raven’s APM and possibly some other scales are copyrighted). Still, it’s great of the journal and the authors to provide the data. Anyway, I’ll take a look.

  The supplement contains the statements and the corresponding descriptive statistics for their profundity ratings. It’s an entertaining read.

  ETA: For additional doses of profundity, use Armok_GoB’s profound LW wisdom generator.

• VincentYuNov 12, 2015, 2:09 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Here.

• VincentYuNov 11, 2015, 5:19 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Requested.

• VincentYuNov 11, 2015, 5:04 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015

  See also Patton’s (1988) “Can bad men make good brains do bad things?” (AKA “Brain in a vat on a trolley”), published in APA Proceedings.

• VincentYuOct 13, 2015, 12:10 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Here.

• VincentYuOct 6, 2015, 8:20 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  it blew up to 14M

  The object streams for indirect objects have been unpacked and stripped away, leaving their contents uncompressed. Use qpdf to regenerate compressed object streams:

  qpdf --object-streams=generate in.pdf out.pdf
  

  (The --stream-data=compress option is already set by default.)

  While you are at it, might as well re-linearize the PDF for online readers with low bandwidth:

  qpdf --object-streams=generate --linearize in.pdf out.pdf
  

• VincentYuOct 5, 2015, 4:04 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Got the whole PDF from HathiTrust. I think Chart I is missing from the scan.

• VincentYuSep 24, 2015, 3:00 AM

  12 points

  on: Against Ex­pected Utility

  Downvoted. I’m sorry to be so critical, but this is the prototypical LW mischaracterization of utility functions. I’m not sure where this comes from, when the VNM theorem gets so many mentions on LW.

  A utility function is, by definition, that which the corresponding rational agent maximizes the expectation of, by choosing among its possible actions. It is not “optimal as the number of bets you take approaches infinity”: first, it is not ‘optimal’ in any reasonable sense of the word, as it is simply an encoding of the actions which a rational agent would take in hypothetical scenarios; and second, it has nothing to do with repeated actions or bets.

  Humans do not have utility functions. We do not exhibit the level of counterfactual self-consistency that is required by a utility function.

  The term “utility” used in discussions of utilitarianism is generally vaguely-defined and is almost never equivalent to the “utility” used in game theory and related fields. I suspect that is the source of this never-ending misconception about the nature of utility functions.

  Yes, it is common, especially on LW and in discussions of utilitarianism, to use the term “utility” loosely, but don’t conflate that with utility functions by creating a chimera with properties from each. If the “utility” that you want to talk about is vaguely-defined (e.g., if it depends on some account of subjective preferences, rather than on definite actions under counterfactual scenarios), then it probably lacks all of useful mathematical properties of utility functions, and its expectation is no longer meaningful.

• VincentYuSep 15, 2015, 5:31 AM

  11 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015

  I see. Looking into this, it seems that the (mis)use of the phrase “confidence interval” to mean “credible interval” is endemic on LW. A Google search for “confidence interval” on LW yields more than 200 results, of which many—perhaps most—should say “credible interval” instead. The corresponding search for “credible interval” yields less than 20 results.

• VincentYuSep 15, 2015, 5:06 AM

  7 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015

  I briefly skimmed the paper and don’t see how you are getting this impression. Confidence intervals are—if we force the dichotomy—considered a frequentist rather than Bayesian tool. They point out that others are trying to squish a Bayesian interpretation on a frequentist tool by treating confidence intervals as though they are credible intervals, and they state this quite explicitly (p.17–18, emphasis mine):

  Finally, we believe that in science, the meaning of our inferences are important. Bayesian credible intervals support an interpretation of probability in terms of plausibility, thanks to the explicit use of a prior. Confidence intervals, on the other hand, are based on a philosophy that does not allow inferences about plausibility, and does not utilize prior information. Using confidence intervals as if they were credible intervals is an attempt to smuggle Bayesian meaning into frequentist statistics, without proper consideration of a prior. As they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch; one must choose. We suspect that researchers, given the choice, would rather specify priors and get the benefits that come from Bayesian theory. We should not pretend, however, that the choice need not be made. Confidence interval theory and Bayesian theory are not interchangeable, and should not be treated as so.

• VincentYuAug 22, 2015, 5:26 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Here. Sorry about the horrible format; I didn’t see a better way to download the content or print the page. In addition, I couldn’t access the figures.

• VincentYuJul 24, 2015, 10:37 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  Page-by-page .djvu scans are available here (found via this search; edit: it seems to appear sporadically in the search results). Full sequence of download links is http://​​202.116.13.3/​​ebook%5C24/​​24000522/​​ptiff/​​00000{001..744}.djvu

  ---

  I wrote the following just before finding the scan of the book. I’ll post it anyway.

  I’ve used 1DollarScan for about 50 books, including math/​stat textbooks, and the quality is consistently good (unless you need accurate color reproduction) even with the cheapest option (i.e., $1 per 100 pages), but you’ll need to do your own post-processing to:

  • Lossily compress further and binarize B/​W text; expect about 400 KB/​page from 1DollarScan.

  • Perform OCR; 1DollarScan’s OCR option is expensive and performs okay at best.

  • Straighten pages; pages are often offset slightly from the vertical.

  • Add metadata (e.g., page numbering, section bookmarks).

  I use Adobe Acrobat with ABBYY FineReader for these. FineReader’s OCR is more accurate than Acrobat’s, but Acrobat performs okay by itself. Acrobat’s trial can be indefinitely reactivated every month in a Windows VM by reverting to a pre-activation snapshot, whereas FineReader has to be bought or torrented, as its trial is overly restrictive. I don’t know of any good options on Linux.

  BTW, there’s a used copy on Half.com for $39. Not sure if you saw that.

• VincentYuJul 3, 2015, 1:20 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015

  You take the probability of A not happening and multiply by the probability of B not happening. That gives you P(not A and not B).

  Only if A and B are independent.

• VincentYuJun 10, 2015, 1:50 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Gram_Stone’s comment on: Stupid Ques­tions March 2015

  No. “Expected value” refers to the expectation of a variable under a probability distribution, whereas “expected utility” refers specifically to the expectation of a utility function under a probability distribution. That is, expected utility is a specific instantiation of an expected value; expected value is more general than expected utility and can refer to things other than utility.

  The importance of this distinction often arises when considering the utility of large sums of money: a person may well decline a deal or gamble with positive expected value (of money) because the expected utility can be negative (for example, see the St. Petersburg paradox).

• VincentYuJun 10, 2015, 1:35 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: emr’s comment on: Stupid Ques­tions March 2015

  See also this highly-upvoted question on the Physics Stack Exchange, which deals with your question.

• VincentYuJun 6, 2015, 6:33 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015

  Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

  I received exactly the same number of SNPs from BGI, so it looks like our data were processed under the same pipeline. I’ve found three people who have publicly posted their BGI data: two at the Personal Genome Project (hu2FEC01 and hu41F03B, each with 5,095,048 SNPs), and one on a personal website (with 18,217,058 SNPs).

  Then there are a few thousand SNPs that one or other analysis (in 26 cases, both) list in their output but don’t report anything for. What causes this?

  The double dashes are no calls. 23andme reports on a set list of SNPs, and instead of omitting an SNP when they can’t confidently determine the genotype, they indicate this with a double dash.

  Is this amount of mismatch typical for such analyses?

  This seems normal considering the error rates from 23andme that others have been reporting (example). I don’t know about BGI’s error rates.

  I think it might be possible to accurately guess the actual genotypes for some of the mismatches by imputing the genotypes with something like Impute2 (for each mismatched SNP, leave it out and impute it using the nearby SNPs). This will take many hours of work, though, and you might as well phase and impute across the whole genome if you have the time, interest, and processing power to do so (I’ve been meaning to try this out to learn more about how these things work).

• VincentYuJun 6, 2015, 5:13 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  ILL couldn’t get Schretlen et al. Can try again once the paper is included in the print journal, but I’d recommend just asking the authors for a copy.

• VincentYuMay 23, 2015, 1:54 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong Help Desk—free pa­per down­loads and more (2014)

  • Lyons and French.

  • Vo et al.

  • Kantner.

  • Mowsesian and Heyer.

  I’m still waiting for Schretlen et al.

• VincentYuMay 21, 2015, 7:18 AM

  0 points

  on: How much does where you go to col­lege af­fect earn­ings?

  Dale and Krueger’s paper was revised and published in the Journal of Human Resources under the new title “Estimating the effects of college characteristics over the career using administrative earnings data”.