“You sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to feel that same level of confidence.”
Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. “Well, it’s all math,” he says. “If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That’s the whole point of math.”
-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
A 5-year-old independently devised hypothesis testing. There is hope for this species.
Now we just need to teach him about estimating the probability that Santa looked at the full range of requests and decided to fulfill a subset that had only been told to the parents.
I hereby take part in the tradition and note that the tradition makes the following moot for relatively low levels of karma. You may round off your karma score if you want to be less identifiable. If your karma score is 15000 or above, you may put 15000 if you want to be less identifiable.
Income question: needs to specify individual or household. You may also want to specify sources, such as whether to include government aid, only include income from wages, or separate boxes for different categories of income.
I have done professional survey design and am available to assist with reviewing the phrasing of questions for surveys, here or on other projects.
[As the] percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives [has gone from “almost none” to “almost all,”] in the last few years, with very little fanfare, we’ve conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.
xkcd explains that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence .
Xander: Yep, vampires are real. A lot of ‘em live in Sunnydale. Willow ’ll fill you in.
Willow: I know it’s hard to accept at first.
Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.
One of the stronger examples of Bayesian updating in fiction, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, episode 13
One of the more useful class discussions I had consciously started with the opposite. The first question was what was good and useful in the week’s reading. We proceeded to criticism, but starting with “is there anything useful here?” made the discussion more useful and positive.
Wikipedia has a couple of citations giving it to Healey, although that is hardly definitive. The First Law of Holes has its own subsection on his Wikipedia page.
This was well done, and fairly done too, for anything that wins is fair in war, and the greatest victory is the one that takes the fewest blows.
Stranger-Come-Knocking on why rationalists win life-or-death fights in The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this is pathetic self-delusion.
Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I should perhaps explain that perceived connection. I see it in two pieces.
One is a counterpart to Joy in the Merely Real. Just because something is commonplace does not mean it is not wonderful. Just because something is commonplace does not mean it is not horrible. The end of each conscious life is a distinct tragedy, even if it happens 100 times per minute. Every one counts.
The other is a case against rationalization. Looking for a greater meaning or epic poetry in death ignores the basic problem that it is bad. A million deaths is a million tragedies, not a statistic. Shut up and multiply. We all come from cultures that spent millennia developing rationalizations for the inevitability of death. If a solution is possible, and possible within our lifetimes, the proper response is to find it rather than growing effusive about “a great and tragic beauty.”
(And, of course, how do you avoid it?)
Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. …
Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.
Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks.
It was a very ordinary tragedy, she supposed, but no less a cause for regret because it was so common. Like a hint, a foretaste of grief, it was an original, even unique experience for everyone it affected, no matter how often it had happened in the past to others.
And how did you avoid it?
Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. The context differs, but it reminded me of the folks working to eliminate death.
This is a conceptually simple trade-off, although the math would be difficult. Assume that a Federation under Vulcan control would make better decisions but would have more difficulty implementing them (either on a sufficient scale or as effectively) because the strengths that make them better analysts are not the same strengths that make humans charismatic leaders. The Federation might not have as many planets, those planets might not be as willing to implement Vulcan ideas when advocated by Vulcans, etc. Is overall utility higher if Vulcans take the optimal action A% of the time at X% effectiveness or if humans take the optimal action B% of the time at Y% effectiveness? (You would adjust “the optimal action” for the relative strengths of the two species.)
If you believed that AX > BY, you formed the Romulan Empire. If you believed that AX < BY, you joined the Federation. I don’t know enough Star Trek lore to say what happens if you end up with different estimates than the rest of your faction (defection, agitation for political change, execution?).
A lot of people gave very selflessly to build this warship so we can go out and battle the vikings, but the time has come to admit that hard work and hope are no substitute for actual knowledge and that we’ve made a really shitty ship. If we sail this ship against the vikings, we’ll be massacred immediately.
Oglaf webcomic, “Bilge”
(Oglaf is usually NSFW, so I’m not linking, even if this particular comic has nothing worse than coarse language.)
The quote is the next line from the quote source.
“Moral: life is inarguably a depressingly unfair endeavor.”
If you’re in a group where “that’s not fair” is frequently a winning argument, you may already be in trouble.
I’m pretty sure most of my Christian friends don’t believe that any of Genesis is literally true.
About a third of Americans believe “the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally,” explicitly contrasted with “the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally.” Your friends are probably not a representative sample of Americans, and even then, a third is a minority, but it is a rather large minority. I know people in this category.
The next question is whether they really believe it or just believe in belief. If you press those people, will they bite the bullet and accept talking serpents and donkeys, surviving in whales, and trumpet blasts knocking down city walls? Yes, some of them really will, and there are certainly communities where this remains a majority belief.
Obviously, it was his own view that had been in error. That was quite a realization, that he had been wrong. He wondered if he had ever been wrong about anything important.
-- Sterren with a literal realization that the territory did not match his mental map in The Unwilling Warlord by Lawrence Watt-Evans
-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson