Comments on: If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 02:39:08 +0000

That is not what utilitarianism is. Utilitarianism does not say that felicific calculus is how to solve your problems. It says to solve your problems. Deontology says to use certain methods. Virtue Ethics says to do things for certain reasons.

If you are deciding whether or not to use felicific calculus based on which method will have superior results, you are already a utilitarian. If you decide against felicific calculus based on the idea that it’s heartless, then you are not a utilitarian.

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By: DanielLC

DanielLC — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 02:31:31 +0000

You can do a simple sensitivity analysis by making up numbers more than once. If the answer changes too much, then don’t rely on the numbers.

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By: Benquo

Benquo — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 11:58:34 +0000

Calibration is often awful, and cannot easily be improved.

Do you have evidence for this? I thought Calibration was one of the few things we actually did understand how to improve, by giving people Calibration exercises.

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By: Common Responses to Earning to Give | The Centre for Effective Altruism

Common Responses to Earning to Give | The Centre for Effective Altruism — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:33:49 +0000

[…] been reading a lot of Slate Star Codex recently, so I’ll refer interested readers to Scott Alexander for a more detailed analysis of this […]

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By: David Chapman

David Chapman — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 23:37:00 +0000

While preparing another post on this topic, I’ve found that this kind of sensitivity analysis is indeed a known technique. It’s called Robust Bayesian analysis. FTW!

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By: Paul Crowley

Paul Crowley — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:20:37 +0000

When our intuitions are likely to be good, which is either when it’s a situation we’ve evolved to handle or where it’s one we’ve seen many times and have had an opportunity to train.

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By: The disappointing rightness of Scott Alexander | The Last Conformer

The disappointing rightness of Scott Alexander | The Last Conformer — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:52:49 +0000

[…] proof of his smartness is of course in agreeing with me. On his blog he has a defense of handwavy utilitarianism as a false but still useful heuristic. His […]

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Fri, 03 May 2013 21:37:25 +0000

The first half of this post seems to me to say that making up numbers and plugging them into a model is better than using your gut, while the second half says merely that you should make up models and numbers and compare them to your gut. This seems to have lead to a lot of people ignoring the second half and objecting to the first half. First impressions!

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By: Deiseach

Deiseach — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:48:02 +0000

So when do you know that there really is a good chance that you need to have a mammogram? I’m coming up to the age where the advice is contradictory: one lot say women need national screening programmes and every woman from the age of X should have one every Y years; another lot says mammograms are unnecessary and do more harm than good by making women think every lump or bump is potential cancer and false positives are more prevalent than not.

I’m really not heartened to know that decisions about medical intervention (either pro or con) are made on the basis of “Yeah, we just pulled this number out of the air”.

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By: naath

naath — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:03:06 +0000

Many people in North Korea are confident enough that North Korea is a very bad place to live that they are willing to risk very serious consequences (death, torture, imprisonment, extreme poverty, massive culture-shock… amongst others) to get out. That doesn’t mean they think the USA is better of course.

Presumably other people in North Korea have bought the propoganda; and still others are having a fine time being part of the ruling class.

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