tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-493316160106079605.post3985597287391636099..comments2014-10-25T05:13:22.295-07:00Comments on Rationality Boot Camp: You are not as agenty as you think and MagicJohn Fabenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11639310598311571875noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-493316160106079605.post-87197121915573306102011-06-21T00:39:13.596-07:002011-06-21T00:39:13.596-07:00Mitchell, I can think of lots of other reasons for...Mitchell, I can think of lots of other reasons for the homogeneity (note, incidentally, that I'm mostly surprised by the lack of variety in age, rather than the dominance of white males), I am simply making a statement about how I updated on the available evidence: let A be the statement, "Most members of SIAI are members for mainly social reasons", and let B be the statement "the SIAI cluster is fairly homogeneous in age". I claim simply that P(A|B) > P(A|¬B). It is possible that I'm wrong, but I doubt it. Given this it is clearly more likely that A is true given an observation of B than it would be had I not observed ¬B. In other words, B is evidence for A.<br /><br />I make no claim whatever about the strength of the evidence, other than the implicit claim that I think it is enough to be worth mentioning (my intuitions say, quite strongly, that A is, in fact, true, but I don't have much explicit reasoning to back that up, so don't trust it very much).<br /><br />I would further make the claim that P(SIAI is the most efficient charity in the world|A)> P(SIAI is the most efficient charity in the world|¬A). This is not quite as clear cut, but I think is at least more likely to be true than not, however, this doesn't appear to be the part of my explanation that you disagree with, at least, it's not the part of my explanation that your post relates to.John Fabenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11639310598311571875noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-493316160106079605.post-23587342656470796412011-06-20T01:38:46.253-07:002011-06-20T01:38:46.253-07:00"I take the homogeneity of the crowd as evide..."I take the homogeneity of the crowd as evidence in favour of the proposition that most of the people involved are mostly involved in the group of social reasons (this must be true, as if the group was more diverse, then this would provide evidence against the idea that they are all involved for social reasons, at least according to my naive models of human social groups)." <br /><br />This appears to be the fallacy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent" rel="nofollow">denying the antecedent</a>. Surely you can think of other reasons why the group might have the composition that it does, some PC (white male privilege offering superior access to scientific education), some not PC (higher male genetic variance producing a larger population of high-IQ individuals).Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10768655514143252049noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-493316160106079605.post-52989352669248725032011-06-20T00:52:54.608-07:002011-06-20T00:52:54.608-07:00Mitchell, sorry, I think I intended to do so expli...Mitchell, sorry, I think I intended to do so explicitly, but then decided against it... I take the homogeneity of the crowd as evidence in favour of the proposition that most of the people involved are mostly involved in the group of social reasons (this must be true, as if the group was more diverse, then this would provide evidence against the idea that they are all involved for social reasons, at least according to my naive models of human social groups). <br /><br />This is not a major worry, obviously, but is at least some evidence against the very strong claims that SIAI make about their efficiency as a charitable organisation (I have made no effort whatever to actually calculate the magnitude of the update I should make on learning this new evidence... I haven't been trying to think in terms of odds ratios for very long).John Fabenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11639310598311571875noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-493316160106079605.post-40152488388140388802011-06-19T23:41:31.957-07:002011-06-19T23:41:31.957-07:00I don't think you got around to explaining why...I don't think you got around to explaining why the homogeneity of the SIAI crowd is worrying.Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10768655514143252049noreply@blogger.com