I mean, maybe it is possible to assign probabilities to future events that you have never seen before, but somehow I doubt it (with 12.88% likelihood).
You doubt it? That means you're assigning some underlying probability to the event (not) occurring. Why does it seem strange to you if people are explicit about their priors?
In any case, it is precisely my argument (and Scott Alexander's) that there are no events to which it is axiomatically impossible to assign probabilities.
I'm well aware of the nature of the argument, having been an SSC reader long before the whole Cade Metz kerfuffle, and still being an ACX reader now - admittedly these days more to see what Alexander is on about lately; it's been some time since I've taken him seriously. A major reason why that's the case is because I've yet to see from any source a substantiation of that argument which is sustainable in the absence of a lot of handwaving. Granted, nobody waves hands like Scott Alexander! That's a lot of why I still find him so entertaining. But the handwaving is still handwaving.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its...
What about the fun of speculating? Attempting to see how well you can reason about something you no nothing about?
I don't know much about superconductors, but I do know that people have been trying to make them work at room temperature, and generally failing
you came with presumption that this man knows & understands the subject matter. that is a very bold assumption given the mounting evidence against such brief.
> so lets assign a 10% probability
why 10%? not 0.01%? because of his "prof." title or previous publications? Surely that won't change the course of nature I thought?
> and then from reputed Western researchers/labs.
what makes you discount inputs from Russian, Chinese, Japanese researchers?
You seem to have some really wired brief here, get some help I say.
I googled "wired brief" and this is what I found:
Sorry if you felt made fun of.
Best to ignore people once you have identified that they are on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger curve
Which isn't to say you or the other replies next to mine are wrong — any memes that get shared also get misunderstood, including attempts to be… less wrong.
(Putting numbers on my uncertainty has mainly made me aware that I'm bad at it, which is useful to be aware of even if it doesn't make me better at it).
Your politics are revealed with your choice of examples here.
Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed.
> Your politics are revealed with your choice of examples here [Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible].
I understand that antivax has been claimed by the mainstream right (there are antivaxers on the far-left but they have limited influence), but it feels like I'm living in some bizarro world that people see the efficacy of vaccination as being "political." It feels like I'm living a ham-handed allegorical story about dangers of irrationalism.
> Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed.
I'd argue that trusting your gut or trusting experts are both decision-making models. They both work well within the right context and fail outside those contexts.
* Trusting your gut is often the right option when you have to make an immediate decision and you don't have time to weight the various options. Something weird is happening on the highway ahead of me should I break now? I have 0.3 seconds to decide.
* Trusting the experts works if the experts are experts in that field and that experts in that field have a long track record of correct predictions and the experts are talking to are in fact experts in that field and have access to the level data which has rendered correct predictions in the data. I'd assign a near 100% probability to a statement by an astronomer that tomorrow night will be a full moon over Toronto, I'd be less likely to assign a high probability to a physicist saying that this new experiment they have will detect sterile neutrinos.
Even those fields in which I am an expert in, I weigh the claims of other subject matter experts when I do not have the time to do the necessary reading and work. The biggest problem with trusting experts is determining is a particular "expert" is actually an expert in that field when you are non-expert in that field.
My beliefs and my politics are pretty transparent in my comment history, I'm not trying to avoid them being "revealed" whatsoever.
> Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed
Not me? I saw people applying the methods we're talking about to convince themselves that the likelihood of their pet conspiracy theory is true is around the same as a coin toss. You can reach bone-headed conclusions if you're determined to do so, whether you use some decision-making mental model or not.
Not OP but "this man" has published enough papers on superconductors[0] that yes, he absolutely deserves the benefit of the doubt.
[0]: See e.g. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hyun... or https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_P8mux4AAAAJ&hl=de...
given such facts, it is totally reasonable to question his expertise on the concern subject. you are free to judge people purely based on how much they publish, I totally respect that.
- There have already been some retractions from China after the initial replication claims. I get the feeling they have been overeager about this to prove themselves. Maybe if they approach this with cooler heads, they could be depended on more.
- When i said western labs, i spiritually include japan, taiwan, south korean labs in that, since they generally have similar practices and rigor (even if geographically they are in the east)
It's difficult to communicate with you if you just redefine common expressions however you see fit. It's like saying "by left, I mean right." Just... stop.
A joke a military contact cracked once is that the only diff between these three and guam, is that guam is officially recognized as US territory.
Make of that what you will.
Are you implying that the west is as corrupted as Japan? That is not something I can agree with.
In case you got yourself isolated from daily news for too long, below is just some recent news regarding those common practices in japanese labs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_scientific_misconduct...
most japanese major groups are falsifying their various type of data - just look at recent news since 2015
Hitachi admitted falsifying data on brake testing https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14508789
More fraudulent testing found in Mitsubishi Electric https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14630514
Accounting fraud by Toshiba https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Toshiba-s-chairma...
Kobe Steel admits data fraud went on nearly five decades https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kobe-steel-scandal-ceo/ko...
As a widely accepted measure of this, you can read about the many nobel laureates from japan.
Anyways lets keep politics out of the discussion. It was not my intent anyway, in case you perceived it that way.
At most, the preprint(s) you're referring to suggest that maybe (under their unverified assumptions) electron-electron interactions could lead to interesting physics in that material. It provides no evidence for what that physics looks like and says nothing about what temperature these things will occur.
High temperature superconductivity is not well understood and we do not have the theoretical tools to make quantitative predictions about it. At best we run dodgy simulations, squint at the resulting plots, and say "hm, that's interesting".
So either you do not model it at all, or come up with some mental model of what probability you are comfortable with and due to which factors; the factors being more important than the final number.
K event = Kim says Material L is RTSC
D event = DFT says L is RTSC
S event = L is actually RTSC
we have assumed P(S/K) and P(S/D) are each 0.1, though we could have chosen other numbers for them as well.
We want to estimate P = P(S/(K and D))
P = P((K and D)/S)P(S)/P(K and D)
Assuming Kim and DFT are in the business of making positive predictions, they always get it right when L is actually RTSC.
so P(K/S),P(D/S) and P((K and D)/S) are all taken as 1
hence P = P(S)/P(K and D) = P(S)/(P(K)P(D/K)) = P(S/K)/P(D/K) = 0.1/P(D/K)
(similarly, P = P(S/D)/P(K/D) = 0.1/P(K/D))
But ofcourse we dont know P(D/K) or P(K/D). We could check historical data on how often D aligns with K, a messy exercise at best. Say they dont perfectly align, then the conditionals are less than 1,and P>0.1. Even intuitively when K (or D) gets additional support in the form of D (or K), your P should increase, not decrease.
If we assume D and K align on average, then P(D/K) or P(K/D) is 0.5, and we get P = 0.2.
You may estimate everything above differently, thus getting a different P. You can also come up with your own way of modelling this. I came up with my particular estimate to understand how frequently should i follow the news, and care about the whole thing. You should model it according to your usecase.
Furthermore, you can’t just say “I understand things semantically different than everyone else talking about probabilities so when I say the probability of two events happening is 20% I actually mean something completely different and my math works this way I invented to describe why my messy naive intuitions about probability don’t match the reality of how probability works”.
> P(S)/(P(K)P(D/K)) = P(S/K)/P(D/K)
What?
That doesn’t make sense either. Seems like someone is falling prey to an intuitive fallacy of probability.
The weird model is just wrong in the first place. The commenter we’re discussing conflates the probability of two people saying something with the probability that what they say is true. So yes, you have to model the situation correctly in the first place.
On the other hand, if those 10 were engaged in complete groupthink (so no additional information beyond the first guy), the overall estimate would remain 10%.
In general, the answer would lie between 0.1 and ~0.65 depending on how their estimates influence each other.
You can’t add them, but you can multiply 90% by 90% and get an 81% chance of not RTSC, or a 19% chance of RTSC according to this model.
Everyone is suddenly an expert in HT Kim's character who didn't have any idea who he was a month ago.
And this definitely is a sort of "black swan" event in the same sense that major airline crashes are absolutely atypical of normal air travel. Inherently this viral media event is going to involve atypical constituent parts.
The idea that we could have found one of the most overconfident and underqualified material science researchers out there, who could not realize they were committing career suicide, making these claims isn't very paradoxical at all.
Most aircraft maintenance is exceptionally high quality. You're going to find a lot of bad maintenance in the fatal air disasters that hit the headlines. The FAA doesn't approach an air disaster by assuming the good intent of everyone involved with the maintenance of the plane, and that their inherently understanding that lives are in their hands if they make mistakes should necessarily diminish the likelihood of maintenance issues. They assign "0%" significance to that kind of things and instead just investigate what caused the crash. If it was bad maintenance then the operator and/or the mechanic doing the maintenance take the hit to their reputations.
Same thing here.
- Hyun-Tak Kim is unlikely to ruin his career and legacy for something careless and frivolous. But stranger things have happened, so lets assign a 10% probability to give some benefit of doubt to the team.
- The various DFT papers show interesting flat band structures. But DFT is an approximation and also they do not take into account electron electron correlations. So lets assign another 10% probability for this support.
This crude estimate would give a 20% chance of RTSC. Rest has to be resolved by actual demonstrations, primarily from the Korean team themselves, and then from reputed Western researchers/labs.