@kaia i don't have to do statistics today but I want to
@rime Used that in niplav.site/china.html, but takes some intuition to build up.
So, TL;DR: I think probabilities expressed as percentages are a-okay 🙂
@rime CIs work if your belief is over some real-valued quantity out there in the world. If it's a probability on a binary event (will X/won't X) I *think* a CI is not necessary—at least nobody has been able to come up with a good argument why a probability distribution over belief on binary propositions doesn't just "integrate out". (Infrabayesian shenanigans aside.)
When I want to still have a CI on a binary proposition I guess noting
parameters for a Beta-distribution would work?
@rime I think point estimates are totally fine, and hard to mess up.
I still go with percentage-space most of the time because my beliefs aren't *that* strong in most cases.
And likelihood ratios would be used if you're updating a proposition
based on some evidence (where you need *both*)—seeing E updates H by 2 shannon (base-2 supremacy, sorry :-D)
I now wonder whether notation is useful for the update case…
(started at niplav.site/subscripts.html#Share_Likelihood_Ratios_not_Beliefs)
@rime answer in a minute
@rime noice emoji I didn't know I needed
Something big happened this weekend. Everyone is talking about it. Many are feeling a new sense of hope.
That's right: I finished writing my new book "What is Entropy?" It's just 120 pages long. It has a lot of sections, mostly one page each, each based on a tweet. This is just a draft, and I'm still fixing typos and other mistakes. So grab a copy - and if you catch errors, please let me know, either here or on my blog!
It is not a pop book: it's an introduction that assumes you know calculus. But it's about a lot of big, bold concepts, and I try to really get to the bottom of them:
• information
• Shannon entropy and Gibbs entropy
• the principle of maximum entropy
• the Boltzmann distribution
• temperature and coolness
• the relation between entropy, expected energy and temperature
• the equipartition theorem
• the partition function
• the relation between entropy, free energy and expected energy
• the entropy of a classical harmonic oscillator
• the entropy of a classical particle in a box
• the entropy of a classical ideal gas
I learned a lot by trying to explain in words what people often say only with equations.
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2024/07/20/what-is-entropy/
Lewd vent
@Paradox pouring one out for everyone afflicted by cute Austrian deficiency
Discourse: Cost Disease
@Angle I think that Georgism predicts that housing will become the major driver of labor cost, but in affluent societies I think that's not right at the moment—many people are far above subsistence level, spending money on holidays, entertainment, eating out &c, which are fairly capital- and natural resource-expensive.
But cheaper housing would still be awesome, perhaps on par with open borders
@rime hahaha
I operate by Crocker's rules[1].