I did fake Bayesian math with some plausible numbers, and found that if I started out believing there was a 20% per decade chance of a lab leak pandemic, then if COVID was proven to be a lab leak, I should update to 27.5%, and if COVID was proven not to be a lab leak, I should stay around 19-20%
This is so confusing: why bother doing "fake" math? How does he justify these numbers? Let's look at the footnote:
Assume that before COVID, you were considering two theories:
- Lab Leaks Common: There is a 33% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.
- Lab Leaks Rare: There is a 10% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.
And suppose before COVID you were 50-50 about which of these were true. If your first decade of observations includes a lab-leak-caused pandemic, you should update your probability over theories to 76-24, which changes your overall probability of pandemic per decade from 21% to 27.5%.
Oh, he doesn't, he just made the numbers up! "I don't have actual evidence to support my claims, so I'll just make up data and call myself a 'good Bayesian' to look smart." Seriously, how could a reasonable person have been expected to be concerned about lab leaks before COVID? It simply wasn't something in the public consciousness. This looks like some serious hindsight bias to me.
I don’t entirely accept this argument - I think whether or not it was a lab leak matters in order to convince stupid people, who don’t know how to use probabilities and don’t believe anything can go wrong until it’s gone wrong before. But in a world without stupid people, no, it wouldn’t matter.
Ah, no need to make the numbers make sense, because stupid people wouldn't understand the argument anyway. Quite literally: "To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand my shitty blog posts. The Bayesian math is is extremely subtle..." And, convince stupid people of what, exactly? He doesn't say, so what was the point of all the fake probabilities? What a prick.
I'm not a fanboy or necessarrily agree with his argument, but you're seriously missing the point of what he's trying to say. He's just talking about how big, mediapathic events can unduly influence people's perception of probability and risk. He doesn't need actual real world numbers to show how this works, he's just demonstrating how the math works and how the numbers change. He isn't trying to convince stupid people of anything, they aren't his target audience and they will never think this way.
you think "stupid people" is a meaningful social category, opinion dismissed.
Hey guys look it's the Scott whisperer, Mr. Beandog. Let's see what he's got for us today:
sure
surely then, you wouldn't feel the need to 'splain it
oh ok
No, that isn't what he is saying, actually.
He does, actually. You can't make fake mathematical statements about the real world and expect me to just buy your argument. He is demonstrating how the math hypothetically works in a scenario where he cooks the numbers. There is no reason why one should extrapolate that to the real world.
Oh ok. prior updated. Coulda sworn his target audience was morons.
It's fine, I get that this is "sneer club", where being a dick is more valued than being logical. Like, if you had more detailed critique than "no, you can't do that", maybe this would be a conversation worth having with you.
Oh, we value logic, you’re just bad at it.
hahahaha that’s all you took from these replies? I’m not fucking surprised. off you fuck, logic boy
Oh shit, I guess the rationalists are starting to figure out that sneerclub moved!
That should be our tagline, actually.
Nah, we're just not giving him the benefit of a doubt and also have a lot of context to work with.
Consider the fact that he explicitly writes that you are allowed to reconsider your assumptions on domestic terrorism if a second trans mass shooter incident "happens in a row" but a few paragraphs later Effective Altruists blowing up both FTX and OpenAI in the space of a year the second incident is immediately laundered away as the unfortunate result of them overcorrecting in good faith against unchecked CEO power.
This should stick out even to one approaching this with a blank slate perspective in my opinion.
oh yeah, scott would never use bad math to force a monstrous point
I mean this is just how people work! they hear about one case of sexual harassment, incorrectly update the probabilities in their heads, and then The Left convinces them that airplanes are sexist. these people are too stupid to have thoughts like “sexual harassment is happening way too often given the small size of the model airplane building community, and listening to the victims allowed me to figure out some of the systemic factors for why that’s the case for that community” and that’s why they fall into real, definitely not made up by scott to make the people he doesn’t like seem ridiculous, beliefs like airplanes being sexist. how dare these stupid people exist outside of Scott’s extremely mid imagination.
come the fuck on. this isn’t our first scott alexander post.
my Bayesian priors tell me this is what Scott's post is actually about, and even more shit is a bit close to dropping
though obv i'm just catastrophising on single events that keep on happening
EDIT: oh, of course it'll be yet more shit coming down the line from abusers in EA
My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.
but consider: if it happened, that means it didn't happen
Why didn't he calculate how many people are sexually harassed in a community? That seems a bit relevant, considering that most sexual harrassers harrass multiple people.
Well those people who were sexually harassed actually were mentally unstable and have a history of lying about being sexually harassed so we shouldn't take them seriously. (A thing Scott actually said, as a psychologist who should know that the behavior above actually makes people a higher risk of being assaulted, after (not 100% sure if after or during the accusations btw, but that doesn't matter that much, a ~~wizard~~ psych should know better!) somebody killed themselves over all this).
Scott defending or excusing the abuse in the wider LW community is very much a pattern now. (Eurgh, im noticing im getting a bit angry about this all over again, best to just not engage with this stuff and do other things (got rid of the posts here which might start further discussions and stopped reading Scotts beigeness about probability theory and sexual abuse post)).