Mary Chernyshenko

Feb 24, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Malentropic Gizmo |Mary Chernyshenko

This is an exercise about Planmaking and Surprise-Anticipation. It takes about 2-3 hours. It's a small, simplified exercise, but I think it's a useful building block. Humans often solve complex problems via iteration and empiricism. Usually, trying to figure everything out from first principles without experimenting is a bad idea. You can spend loads of time thinking, and then you go outside and interact with reality for 5 minutes and realize all that thinking was pointed in the wrong direction.

May 6, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Eric Neyman |Charlie Steiner |Jan Christian Refsgaard |Mary Chernyshenko

I think this is a pedagogical Version of Andrew Gelmans shrinkage TriologyThe most important paper also has a blog post, The very short version is if you z score the published effects, then then you can derive a prior for the 20.000+ effects from the Cochrane database. A Cauchy distribution fits very well. The Cauchy distribution has very fat tails, so you should regress small effects heavily towards the null and regress very large effects very little.