[ExI] Model uncertainty (Was: LIGO)
Anders
anders at aleph.se
Thu Nov 10 00:38:19 UTC 2016
On 2016-11-09 19:51, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
>
> I am still trying to get my head around that: how could we have seen
> two crazy-unlikely events in just a few weeks? My view of the cosmos
> must be serious flawed. COOL!
>
> This expresses my feeling exactly. I think somewhere along the line I
> lost contact with the human race and am seriously out of contact with
> reality. I am still stunned.
>
In fact, this is an interesting development. Pollsters and information
markets missed the UK election, Brexit and the US election. The models
are clearly wrong. Even if one accepted that the 15% chance of Trump on
Monday evening was true and we saw a 15% probability event, the swathe
of other recent polling failures demonstrate that something important
has changed.
Generally, I think there is both an epistemic uncertainty about how to
poll current people properly, and a more meaty uncertainty about what is
going on politically. I have recently shifted away from my previous
model that people had a broken epistemology because of networked media
to a model that what we are seeing is more a tribal defense of core
values (Haidt's explanation:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/
).
Now, realizing that one's model is not correct and trying to fix it is
an uneasy but exciting place. Especially since it might mean one should
change strategy about a lot of things.
--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University
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