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

[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.