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Wagers and science are opposite endeavors. A scientist must not care how his theory turns out, but a gambler must care.

by lutusp 13y ago

dllthomas 13y ago
They're different, but they're not opposite. Both involve probability and statistics. And those of us trying to make decisions in the real world must care how our decisions are likely to turn out. Edited to add: More to the point, does the universe care if you're a scientist or a gambler and change the laws of probability? Presuming the answer is no, pretend you're a gambler for a minute, and you should see what's wrong with statement "the initial probability is 100% that the correlation arises from chance": I offer you a wager, where we pick a correlation about which you have not formulated a hypothesis, and if I can show causation of any sort you give me zillions of dollars; if I can't, I give you a dollar. Your expected value, with an assumption of 100%, is that you always get the dollar. Do you really think that, over zillions of games, you'd make money? Edited again: The hypothetical people you're criticizing - who read this article and go out to find a man - aren't trying to "do science", they're trying to successfully wager and make the best bet they can with their health and their life. Of course, we agree that if they're making substantial changes based on this study, they're probably wagering poorly, but that's beside the point.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > And those of us trying to make decisions in the real world must care how our decisions are likely to turn out. Yes -- unless you're a scientist. If you're a scientist and you expect to make a contribution to the store of human knowledge, you cannot care one way or another how your experiments turn out, only that they're conducted with the maximum amount of dispassion and objectivity. > The hypothetical people you're criticizing - who read this article and go out to find a man - aren't trying to "do science", they're trying to successfully wager ... Yes, which is why we see so many articles like the one this thread discusses -- articles that cynically harvest human stupidity to some unworthy purpose.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    "Yes -- unless you're a scientist. If you're a scientist and you expect to make a contribution to the store of human knowledge, you cannot care one way or another how your experiments turn out, only that they're conducted with the maximum amount of dispassion and objectivity." That's a different thing. I wasn't offering to bet you that your hypothesis was correct, which would certainly be a problem; I was expecting you to use your understanding of the world - which should (I hope you agree) be informed by your science! - to make decisions in a non-scientific context. Scientists need to make decisions in the real world, too. '> The hypothetical people you're criticizing - who read this article and go out to find a man - aren't trying to "do science", they're trying to successfully wager ... ;Yes, which is why we see so many articles like the one this thread discusses -- articles that cynically harvest human stupidity to some unworthy purpose.' Trying to successfully wager, in a context where placing some bet is unavoidable (cost/benefit analysis under uncertainty), is not stupidity. So, I agree that "articles that cynically harvest human stupidity to some unworthy purpose" are depressingly common, I disagree that "people need to wager" is (or that they should instead somehow be doing science with their lives just to avoid shoddy journalism).
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Let's use a gambling example. You observe that a man named Ralph wins the lottery. This is a correlation--would you now say that it is slightly more likely than before that men named Ralph will win the lottery? No--that would be silly, right? Well the logic works exactly the same even if the data set is larger than one.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Wait, seriously? There's a lot of other stuff going on in this example, but in general yes - if I discover that someone named Ralph won the lottery, it is slightly more likely that the lottery is somehow biased toward people named Ralph, because explanations of the universe where that is the case very slightly better explain my observations. It's probably still phenomenally more likely that the lottery is not biased toward people named Ralph. Take the other extreme - you look at the 1000 most recent lottery winners, and discover that they're all named Ralph. You look at the names of people buying lottery tickets, and Ralph only shows up 1% of the time. You're not going to consider it any more likely that the next winner will be named Ralph as well?
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > There's a lot of other stuff going on in this example, but in general yes - if I discover that someone named Ralph won the lottery, it is slightly more likely that the lottery is somehow biased toward people named Ralph ... No, that is false. It would be like flipping a coin and seeing heads, then claiming that this outcome increases the probability that heads will be the preferred outcome in future tosses, or tosses in general. Think about what you're saying. > Take the other extreme - you look at the 1000 most recent lottery winners, and discover that they're all named Ralph. You look at the names of people buying lottery tickets, and Ralph only shows up 1% of the time. You're not going to consider it any more likely that the next winner will be named Ralph as well? Not without an explanation that can be tested and potentially falsified -- the gold standard of science. Without an explanation, it's a coincidence. Try to remember that science is not simply drawing conclusions on the basis of observations -- there's more to it than that. It's not science until an explanation (a theory) is proposed, is tested, and has resisted falsification. What if I told you that someone correctly predicted the direction of the stock market for 20 months straight, all in advance? Does that prove he's a stock market genius? Here's a better explanation, one that a scientist would want to test first -- if 1,048,576 (i.e. 2^20) people try to predict the stock market's direction for 20 months straight by flipping coins, there is a better than even chance that one of them will succeed by chance alone. Next question -- what's the chance that the one random winner will assume that his success resulted from chance, or will he start selling a worthless book called "Secrets of the Winners" on late-night TV?

Wagers and science are opposite endeavors. A scientist must not care how his theory turns out, but a gambler must care.

by lutusp 13y ago

Wagers and science are opposite endeavors. A scientist must not care how his theory turns out, but a gambler must care.

They're different, but they're not opposite. Both involve probability and statistics. And those of us trying to make decisions in the real world must care how our decisions are likely to turn out. Edited to add: More to the point, does the universe care if you're a scientist or a gambler and change the laws of probability? Presuming the answer is no, pretend you're a gambler for a minute, and you should see what's wrong with statement "the initial probability is 100% that the correlation arises from chance": I offer you a wager, where we pick a correlation about which you have not formulated a hypothesis, and if I can show causation of any sort you give me zillions of dollars; if I can't, I give you a dollar. Your expected value, with an assumption of 100%, is that you always get the dollar. Do you really think that, over zillions of games, you'd make money? Edited again: The hypothetical people you're criticizing - who read this article and go out to find a man - aren't trying to "do science", they're trying to successfully wager and make the best bet they can with their health and their life. Of course, we agree that if they're making substantial changes based on this study, they're probably wagering poorly, but that's beside the point.

lutusp 13y ago
> And those of us trying to make decisions in the real world must care how our decisions are likely to turn out. Yes -- unless you're a scientist. If you're a scientist and you expect to make a contribution to the store of human knowledge, you cannot care one way or another how your experiments turn out, only that they're conducted with the maximum amount of dispassion and objectivity. > The hypothetical people you're criticizing - who read this article and go out to find a man - aren't trying to "do science", they're trying to successfully wager ... Yes, which is why we see so many articles like the one this thread discusses -- articles that cynically harvest human stupidity to some unworthy purpose.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "Yes -- unless you're a scientist. If you're a scientist and you expect to make a contribution to the store of human knowledge, you cannot care one way or another how your experiments turn out, only that they're conducted with the maximum amount of dispassion and objectivity." That's a different thing. I wasn't offering to bet you that your hypothesis was correct, which would certainly be a problem; I was expecting you to use your understanding of the world - which should (I hope you agree) be informed by your science! - to make decisions in a non-scientific context. Scientists need to make decisions in the real world, too. '> The hypothetical people you're criticizing - who read this article and go out to find a man - aren't trying to "do science", they're trying to successfully wager ... ;Yes, which is why we see so many articles like the one this thread discusses -- articles that cynically harvest human stupidity to some unworthy purpose.' Trying to successfully wager, in a context where placing some bet is unavoidable (cost/benefit analysis under uncertainty), is not stupidity. So, I agree that "articles that cynically harvest human stupidity to some unworthy purpose" are depressingly common, I disagree that "people need to wager" is (or that they should instead somehow be doing science with their lives just to avoid shoddy journalism).
snowwrestler 13y ago
Let's use a gambling example. You observe that a man named Ralph wins the lottery. This is a correlation--would you now say that it is slightly more likely than before that men named Ralph will win the lottery? No--that would be silly, right? Well the logic works exactly the same even if the data set is larger than one.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Wait, seriously? There's a lot of other stuff going on in this example, but in general yes - if I discover that someone named Ralph won the lottery, it is slightly more likely that the lottery is somehow biased toward people named Ralph, because explanations of the universe where that is the case very slightly better explain my observations. It's probably still phenomenally more likely that the lottery is not biased toward people named Ralph. Take the other extreme - you look at the 1000 most recent lottery winners, and discover that they're all named Ralph. You look at the names of people buying lottery tickets, and Ralph only shows up 1% of the time. You're not going to consider it any more likely that the next winner will be named Ralph as well?
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > There's a lot of other stuff going on in this example, but in general yes - if I discover that someone named Ralph won the lottery, it is slightly more likely that the lottery is somehow biased toward people named Ralph ... No, that is false. It would be like flipping a coin and seeing heads, then claiming that this outcome increases the probability that heads will be the preferred outcome in future tosses, or tosses in general. Think about what you're saying. > Take the other extreme - you look at the 1000 most recent lottery winners, and discover that they're all named Ralph. You look at the names of people buying lottery tickets, and Ralph only shows up 1% of the time. You're not going to consider it any more likely that the next winner will be named Ralph as well? Not without an explanation that can be tested and potentially falsified -- the gold standard of science. Without an explanation, it's a coincidence. Try to remember that science is not simply drawing conclusions on the basis of observations -- there's more to it than that. It's not science until an explanation (a theory) is proposed, is tested, and has resisted falsification. What if I told you that someone correctly predicted the direction of the stock market for 20 months straight, all in advance? Does that prove he's a stock market genius? Here's a better explanation, one that a scientist would want to test first -- if 1,048,576 (i.e. 2^20) people try to predict the stock market's direction for 20 months straight by flipping coins, there is a better than even chance that one of them will succeed by chance alone. Next question -- what's the chance that the one random winner will assume that his success resulted from chance, or will he start selling a worthless book called "Secrets of the Winners" on late-night TV?