Against Learning From Dramatic Events
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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:

  1. Lab Leaks Common: There is a 33% chance of a lab-leak-caused pandemic per decade.
  2. 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.

  • @selfMAEnglish
    17•6 months ago

    oh yeah, scott would never use bad math to force a monstrous point

    Take sexual harassment. Surveys suggest that about 5% of people admit to having sexually harassed someone at some point in their lives; given that it’s the kind of thing people have every reason to lie about, the real number is probably higher. Let’s say 10%.

    So if there’s a community of 10,000 people, probably 1,000 of them have sexually harassed someone. So when you hear on the news that someone in that community sexually harassed someone, it shouldn’t change your opinion of that community at all. You started off pretty sure there were about 1,000, and now you know that there is at least one. How is that an update?!

    Still, every few weeks there’s a story about someone committing sexual harassment in (let’s say) the model airplane building community, and then everyone spends a few days talking about how airplanes are sexist and they always knew the model builders were up to no good.

    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.

    • David GerardMAEnglish
      19•6 months ago

      Take sexual harassment.

      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

      • @TinyTimmyTokyoEnglish
        9•6 months ago

        My P(harrassment scandal) for EA is 0.98.

        • David GerardMAEnglish
          8•6 months ago

          but consider: if it happened, that means it didn’t happen

    • @maolEnglish
      12•6 months ago

      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.

      • @SoyweiserEnglish
        9•6 months ago

        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)).

        • @TinyTimmyTokyoEnglish
          8•6 months ago

          Exactly. It would be easier to take Scott’s argument more seriously if it wasn’t coming from the very same person who previously labeled as unstable and thereby non-credible a woman who accused his rationalist buddies of sexual harrassment – a woman who, by the way, went on to die by suicide.

          So fuck him and his contrived rationalizations.