[extropy-chat] A Bayesian Looks at Climate Change

[Edmund Schaefer]

On 4/19/06, Martin Striz <mstriz at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>

> On 4/19/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> > No one in China has ever seen the Emperor of China, but everyone can
> > guess his height to within plus or minus one meter.  Therefore, by
> > polling a million Chinese and averaging their estimates, the law of
> > large numbers says we can get an estimate of the Emperor's height that
> > is accurate to within one millimeter.
>
> But I think that's the point.  You sampled a billion people in exactly
> the same way.  If you start with a number of studies, each with
> different methodologies, then you hope to minimize the  bias in each
> one.



By taking lots of studies and averaging the findings together, you're
polling studies. In the Emperor of China analogy, each citizen's estimate is
a (highly inaccurate) study trying to answer the question "How tall is the
Emperor?" This is not to say that studies of global warming are as
methodologically flawed as the average Chinese person's guess as to the
height of the emperor, but that averaging bad studies together, which may
have correlated biases (say, hypothetically, the Emperor is depicted as
being very tall and muscular in propaganda, and thus people tend to
overestimate his height), does not give you a more accurate answer to your
question.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060420/f5f76161/attachment.html>