There’s sort of a narrative recently around “Oh sure, you think a phenomenon can be modeled with high school math. Such simplisme.” Yep, that thought is wrong, for most things which are not amenable to high school math. But *there is a reason to learn and use high school math.*
-
-
Show this thread
-
Probability is another field of math which is very within the reach of a high schooler. It does not perfectly describe the game of poker but is quite useful. There are poker players who don’t buy probability, as a field. Other poker players love discovering them at their table.
Show this thread -
You would think “I seem to be losing to these people deploying probability; perhaps my model ‘the gods are fickle’ needs an update” would convince poker players, but surprisingly even with extremely visible, salient evidence of losing some people, otherwise normal, say “I won.”
Show this thread -
Given a much more positive sum domain than poker for correctly predicting future behavior of the universe and adapting to it, I would hope we would not say “Hmm, chip counts are one thing, but let’s compare CVs to determine who actually won here. Listen to them this/next time.”
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
I like
@sonyasupposedly's concept of "Mastery through experience"https://twitter.com/catherineols/status/1247701096245506049 … -
fwiw, my $0.02 on that SSC post: being right is worthless in a vacuum, being right and DOING SOMETHING about it is what matters. if you're just sitting there predicting things correctly, who cares? thinking probabilistically is a prerequisite, not sufficient for a victory lap
- 5 more replies
New conversation -
-
-
There’s also something about the basic epistemic posture... do you believe that you can (and must) form your own judgement or do you think that coupling to credentialed others is the best you can do?
-
I kind of look at it as the epistemic posture control panel, where you have a lot of different levers to dial in for individual tasks/fields/etc and sufficient metacognition to reset levers based on new evidence. I have many less levers pegged at "Defer" than I did on January 1.
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
-
-
Very thoughtful analysis. People tend to struggle with how to reason about asymmetric risk, where the probability of an event and its magnitude are wildly different.
-
Fascinating time for people who study asymmetric risk professionally. For most ppl, social pressure/nudges/defaults likely more persuasive than analysis. Wearing a seatbelt to stop the dinging sound vs. understanding that while prob of accident is low, magnitude is very high.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.