Yeah, it’s obviously not meant to be something others should learn from. But I think it would show more understanding to write something outsiders could understand. That’s something I can practice more on other essays. Also an essay shouldn’t be unnecessarily incomprehensible to outsiders, that should be a trade off which makes it better for insiders in some way. Or the author just wants to write quickly, but that makes the essay worse. So thanks for the criticism.
Yes. That’s where I got the idea of the term from. 1.9k words might not be mini though.
Sorry for late reply. I had forgotten you had responded.
So everything I wrote isn’t necessarily meant to correspond with something in the article. The “Confidence Levels and Binary Epistemology” doesn’t correspond to a section in the article and Elliot didn’t discuss degree based epistemology for example. It’s writing practice so I write about things which interested me so that I would write more.
But Elliot did talk about children dropping their standards as a common thing:
But effective learning often mostly stops by age 10 or 15, with perhaps an exception for one’s career (most people actually learn their jobs pretty poorly and have low standards, but some people do understand what they’re doing).
You can have improper or partial knowledge where you know some things about the concept but not everything that’s needed for your purpose. Like some piece of knowledge is built on three other ideas and you only two of them.
You’re evaluating the question “is this an X?”
I just assume the reader is easily able to identify the average orange or apple.
I would rather say ‘like how you can easily identify whether you’re looking at an orange or an apple’. But I don’t think it’s necessary.
I’m trying to respond on the forum in a new way, so I wanna say the stuff below is half-baked in a way. Like, I’m trying not to use so much focus when I write and work. I hope it’s an ok thing to do. I think as long as i tell users that. I’m still ok with being corrected or criticized:
Ok, I think that makes sense. you want to relate that to other stuff
What I’m getting is your knowledge can have more pieces of information than others. What I’m also getting is that there is knowledge that doesn’t fulfill its purpose entirely and that’s partial knowledge. Idk but i heard of “partial knowledge” before
Ok, it seems that if you evaluate something it’s like a yes or no question, and if you do evaluate that, you actually identify x.
Ok I think I see that. I think though people wouldn’t think that’s knowledge. I think they wouldn’t probably connect the dots that well. Or maybe I’m talking for myself
It’s not necessary cuz i think people can probably pick up on it and i think cuz this is more practice for you than an actual article for people to read.
You can also have partial knowledge (which is often called “knowledge”, and could also be called incomplete or unfinished knowledge) when you’ve started learning something, and know some things about it, but you haven’t finished yet. Partial knowledge can be examined in greater detail, in which case you’ll find it involves proper knowledge of some sub-parts of the thing you’re learning.
Yes I think some (or many) people would think that only abstract things like math or science, or concrete facts like what the tallest mountain is, but not mundane things like identifying fruits, are knowledge.
Confidence is an emotion. Just like happiness, it can come in degrees. It’s not an evaluation of the truth or goodness of an idea (which shouldn’t come in degrees). Confidence has no primary role in epistemology.
For risk management, more importance than confidence is whether you have a refutation of proceeding with an idea now or not.
For learning and evaluating mastery, more important than confidence are error rate and being able to explain concepts.
No. Non-emotional “confidence” is related to variance. It’s different than probability/credence. If you just found out about an issue, and didn’t investigate much yet, you could have an initial 80% conclusion but very low confidence it’s correct since you’ll probably change your mind as soon as you look into the matter more. This “confidence” is related to margin of error around your answer like you could be 20% confident that the correct evaluation is in the 70-90% range. This is also called error bars.
You’re wrong to give Bayesian epistemology credit as “quite straightforward” or intuitive on these topics. Harry Binswanger didn’t even understand confidence intervals for measuring devices like rulers or scales. In general, Bayesians often talk about how some of their stuff is unintuitive and requires training, and they debate with other schools of thought about probability like frequentists.
I don’t quite see what this is addressing. I thought I already agreed with this. I thought I did treat confidence as secondary because I’m just trying to see how it could rationally match idea evaluations and/or mastery/skill level. So first we have idea evaluations or we observe skill level and then we ask what level of confidence is appropriate.
That makes sense. So you might end up acting despite your low confidence because you’ve rationally concluded it’s a good idea.
I think your confidence level could be incorporated into a goal criterion. For some goals low confidence is an refutation of the idea and for others it isn’t.
I’m listing to A Man for All Markets and there’s a relevant situation. So Thorp has proved mathematically a strategy to beat the dealer in blackjack. And now after that he’s going out and trying it out in real life. He’s still not fully confident it’ll work because there might things he overlooked, theory vs practice and so on. He starts out slow to build up his confidence:
I started small, betting from $1 to $10, planning to increase my bet size as I became more comfortable with the level of risk.
Why should Thorp’s confidence level be included in his goal? Because with low confidence he could more easily turn emotional and thus make worse decisions from that point onward. That’s the effect it gave him:
This plan, of betting only at a level at which I was emotionally comfortable and not advancing until I was ready, enabled me to play my system with a calm and disciplined accuracy.
Why are they considered in the same category? We shouldn’t evaluate mastery by how confident we feel, rather we should make our confidence match our error rate and capability of explaining things, right?
I was talking about “confidence” as emotional confidence, as in how confident you should feel. Is this something Bayesians think you should reject in favor of non-emotional “confidence”?
Makes sense. So they don’t incorporate the sample size into the credence score itself?
Do they apply a “confidence” score to their “confidence” score? The 70-90% range is a range of probability/credence, right?
Yes, I had a naive interpretation of Bayesian epistemology, which I still think would make it straightforward. So I would be one example of it not being intuitive since I got it wrong. Taking into account sample size and other stuff I don’t know about Bayesian epistemology, things would probably become less intuitive.
When it comes to proper probability and statistics, not epistemology, do you favor the Bayesian school or frequentists, or do they apply to different situations?
I’ve had a probability and statistics class in uni but I want to learn it better. I’m planning on reading Thorp’s and Hamming’s books on probability. Don’t know what statistics book to read.