5 ms·

> "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events..." Ok you have a story. I can tell a different story: "My

> "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events..." Ok you have a story. I can tell a different story: "My tendency towards religious/supernatural belief that has helped me and my ancestors form moral codes and act tribally has in this case caused me to embrace a belief that will lead to the ruin of me and my people. These religious/supernatural beliefs are inherently anti-statistical and lead to lots of incorrect ideas like witchcraft and rainmaking, but these systems of belief are selected by evolution because they overall increase our chances of survival." Now we have two stories, two narratives. Why do you believe yours over mine? And how can we objectively decide which story reflects the truth about the human brain?

powera 11y ago
So you're saying that since some people are religious, brains can't operate on statistics?
- haberman 11y ago
  I think religious belief makes it less likely that all human belief-forming and decision-making are based on statistically sound principles, yes. But the actual point I was making in the message you replied to is much weaker than this. I was arguing that just because we can spin a narrative that says a decision-making process was based on a statistical process doesn't mean that our narrative is true. Just because you can tell a story doesn't mean the story reflects reality. We need some objective way of determining which of several competing narratives is actually true.
nl 11y ago
These religious/supernatural beliefs are inherently anti-statistical No they aren't. They follow the Laplace–Bayes estimator for calculating the rule of succession[1]. I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it rained I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it didn't rain -> I must have done something wrong Both are perfectly valid rules of succession - not forgetting that most religious beliefs make it pretty easy to find something you did wrong. One might suspect these rules could have been caused by spurious statistical relationships. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession
- haberman 11y ago
  > I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it rained [...] I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it didn't rain -> I must have done something wrong This is a textbook example of a non-falsifiable experiment. I'm not sure why you would argue that you can draw meaningful statistical inferences from such an experiment.
  - nl 11y ago
    I'm not arguing this is falsifiable, or an experiment - I'm arguing that it could be statistically interfered. "Statistically valid" != Correct (if your input assumptions are incorrect). See up thread for ways to build falsifiable experiments.
    - haberman 11y ago
      If your argument is that the human mind functions primarily in terms of valid statistical inferences, it doesn't support your case if it processes its input in ways that are inherently flawed and biased.
      - nl 11y ago
        What do you mean by "valid"? If you mean "mathematically correct" then yes that is my premise. If you mean "correct in reality" then no. If you have a prior belief "god created humans" with a 99% confidence, it will take a lot of evidence to override that - especially since the evidence will be a long way down a causality chain (as any online argument about evolution will show). Additionally, the confidence in that belief will be erroneously increased by lots of things you see in nature (eg - humans cannot create other life forms, therefore it must have been done by something supernatural).
        msandford 11y ago
        This thread could be summed up as "my priors tell me that if people were Actually Doing This (tm) it would look like X and it doesn't look like X, thus they aren't!" and then other people saying "uh, if you estimate the priors wrong that doesn't mean you aren't doing bayesian, it just means you estimated the priors wrong and got the wrong answer"
notahacker 11y ago
I don't think we can "objectively decide which story reflects the truth about the human brain", particularly not if focusing on episodes >150 years ago where historians don't even widely agree on exactly what happened, and particularly not for any theory that "statistics is the language of the human brain" that is any more nuanced than the trivially-falsified "human thought processes invariably follow the hypothetico-deductive method and are not subject to confirmation bias, attaching significance to spurious correlations or poor selection of Bayesian priors" But if this was a problem I was particularly motivated to study, the most satisfactory method of reaching a conclusion would be to use statistical analysis to draw conclusions about which hypotheses human thought patterns appeared to be most compatible with (from my experiments and meta-analysis of others'). I don't claim to know whether this is a refinement of my innate human tendency to be impressed by statistical support for a proposition or an unusual level of abstraction I've learned to reason at after spending too much time in an undergrad classroom.

powera 11y ago

So you're saying that since some people are religious, brains can't operate on statistics?

haberman 11y ago
I think religious belief makes it less likely that all human belief-forming and decision-making are based on statistically sound principles, yes. But the actual point I was making in the message you replied to is much weaker than this. I was arguing that just because we can spin a narrative that says a decision-making process was based on a statistical process doesn't mean that our narrative is true. Just because you can tell a story doesn't mean the story reflects reality. We need some objective way of determining which of several competing narratives is actually true.

nl 11y ago

These religious/supernatural beliefs are inherently anti-statistical No they aren't. They follow the Laplace–Bayes estimator for calculating the rule of succession[1]. I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it rained I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it didn't rain -> I must have done something wrong Both are perfectly valid rules of succession - not forgetting that most religious beliefs make it pretty easy to find something you did wrong. One might suspect these rules could have been caused by spurious statistical relationships. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession

haberman 11y ago
> I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it rained [...] I needed rain -> I did a rain dance -> it didn't rain -> I must have done something wrong This is a textbook example of a non-falsifiable experiment. I'm not sure why you would argue that you can draw meaningful statistical inferences from such an experiment.
- nl 11y ago
  I'm not arguing this is falsifiable, or an experiment - I'm arguing that it could be statistically interfered. "Statistically valid" != Correct (if your input assumptions are incorrect). See up thread for ways to build falsifiable experiments.
  - haberman 11y ago
    If your argument is that the human mind functions primarily in terms of valid statistical inferences, it doesn't support your case if it processes its input in ways that are inherently flawed and biased.
    - nl 11y ago
      What do you mean by "valid"? If you mean "mathematically correct" then yes that is my premise. If you mean "correct in reality" then no. If you have a prior belief "god created humans" with a 99% confidence, it will take a lot of evidence to override that - especially since the evidence will be a long way down a causality chain (as any online argument about evolution will show). Additionally, the confidence in that belief will be erroneously increased by lots of things you see in nature (eg - humans cannot create other life forms, therefore it must have been done by something supernatural).
      - msandford 11y ago
        This thread could be summed up as "my priors tell me that if people were Actually Doing This (tm) it would look like X and it doesn't look like X, thus they aren't!" and then other people saying "uh, if you estimate the priors wrong that doesn't mean you aren't doing bayesian, it just means you estimated the priors wrong and got the wrong answer"

notahacker 11y ago

I don't think we can "objectively decide which story reflects the truth about the human brain", particularly not if focusing on episodes >150 years ago where historians don't even widely agree on exactly what happened, and particularly not for any theory that "statistics is the language of the human brain" that is any more nuanced than the trivially-falsified "human thought processes invariably follow the hypothetico-deductive method and are not subject to confirmation bias, attaching significance to spurious correlations or poor selection of Bayesian priors" But if this was a problem I was particularly motivated to study, the most satisfactory method of reaching a conclusion would be to use statistical analysis to draw conclusions about which hypotheses human thought patterns appeared to be most compatible with (from my experiments and meta-analysis of others'). I don't claim to know whether this is a refinement of my innate human tendency to be impressed by statistical support for a proposition or an unusual level of abstraction I've learned to reason at after spending too much time in an undergrad classroom.