belief poll #2

[spoonless]

This time I made sure that the lower end of the range is 0 rather than 1, to make it symmetric with the 10. I don't know why lj defaults to 1-10... I was lazy last time and just left it how they set it up.

I know different people mean different things by choosing different numbers, so to standardize try and do it this way: pick 10 if you are 95%-100% confident that the statement is true. Pick 0 if you are 0-5% confident (in other words, 95%-100% confident it's false). Pick 9 if you are 85%-95% confident it's true. Pick 5 if you are 45-55% confident it's true (in other words, you don't know). I'm going to take browascension's suggestion this time and say that if you're unfamiliar with the topic, just skip it rather than picking 5.

I tried to pick questions that I was a little more agnostic on this time... last time I had too many extreme responses, both from myself and from everyone, so hopefully this one will be more mixed.

[Poll #1438874]

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Two of the questions seemed to me to have plausibly false presuppositions. It seems to me that there probably is no such thing as general intelligence, which makes it hard to say whether or not IQ tests are a good measure of it. And the third to last question presupposes that there are some predictable trends in the stock market - as far as I know, this is pretty much false, though there are plenty of irrationalities in the stock market that are driven by features of human psychology that make these prices tend not to track the value of the stock.

Also, I wasn't sure what to say for the chimpanzee question.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

If you think there is something false implied by the question, then you should judge it to be false (depending on how sure you are that the assumption is false).

For the general intelligence question, I did think of that as I was writing it down... but that was intended to be part of the question... if someone doesn't believe in general intelligence or doesn't believe that it can be measured then they should pick something low on the scale.

For the other one, all I was trying to ask is whether you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true. My understanding is that most academics think it is (although not all) whereas a huge number of people outside of academia are convinced it is false... and there are lots of studies showing one results or the other, depending on who is doing the study.

Rather than just ask "is EMH true?" I figured I would try to write it out more specifically. The main issue is, as you say, whether there are trends. I decided to add the bit about psychology to make it more clear why someone would think there were trends... I realized as I was writing this that I could have left it off and it would have been essentially the same, but for some reason I thought it was interesting to put it on there. Now I kind of wish I had phrased it both ways, because my suspicion would be that including the motivation for believing in trends would increase the average score chosen by people, whereas if they are maximally rational it should decrease the average score. At any rate, the thing you read as the "implied assumption" was actually intended to be the main question.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

all I was trying to ask is whether you believe the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true.

(whether you believe it is false, that is)

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

There's a bit of a distinction between a false presupposition and a false entailment or implication - if you had asked "have you stopped beating your wife?" I'm not sure where on the scale from 0 to 10 I would best answer. But yes, I think I answered both of those with fairly low numbers as a result of the presupposition I think is false. I tend to believe the EMH, at least in some weak forms. (I don't know if you read Crooked Timber, but John Quiggin there has recently had some good posts discussing stronger and weaker forms of it.)

Especially since it gives me sufficient reason not to bother with trying to play the market.

General Intelligence:

[rws1st.livejournal.com]

General Intelligence: Take the set of all possible problems (with all possible tool aids, and constraints (time), environments etc.). The GI of an agent is the subset of the set of all problems that the Agent can solve.

The does not easily turn into a numeric measure.

Re: General Intelligence:

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Except that if you put a brand new problem they've never seen before in front of someone who scores high on g-loaded tests, they are more likely to be able to solve it than someone who scores low on such tests. I'm not saying IQ tests are all that accurate or that the resolution they claim to have is meaningful... but if you look at the extreme examples, like someone who's a 60 versus someone who's a 140, there is a pretty striking difference. That's why I chose an "8" for that question... I'm reasonably sure that it's measuring something that deserves to be called general intelligence, but not completely sure.

Re: General Intelligence:

[rws1st.livejournal.com]

We don't disagree about the abilities of standard IQ tests.

In the framework I presented think about it this way:

The set of all problems can be loosely thought about as existing in some space of some dimensionality.

So say some problems take a certain amount of short term memory, or speed of computation, or background knowledge or some such. The IQ tests try and find some boundaries in this space that predict the sub-set of problems that a agent can do.

Now there are limitations. There are certain important real world problems that might required persistent work for months to solve where the person doesn't lose focus or resolve. An IQ test may do poorly at predicting success in these types of problems. And so on for other dimensions that IQ tests don't measure.

But they do measure some important dimensions and so can be useful!