The article missed the chance to include the quote from that standard compendium of information and wisdom, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
> Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
sayamqazi · 1h ago
Wouldnt you need the T_zero configuration of the universe for this to work?
Given different T_zero configs of matter and energies T_current would be different. and there are many pathways that could lead to same physical configuration (position + energies etc) with different (Universe minus cake) configurations.
Also we are assuming there is no non-deterministic processed happening at all.
senko · 1h ago
I am assuming integrating over all possible configurations would be a component of The Total Perspective Vortex.
After all, Feynman showed this is in principle possible, even with local nondeterminism.
(this being a text medium with a high probability of another commenter misunderstanding my intent, I must end this with a note that I am, of course, BSing :)
Evidlo · 1h ago
This is such a massive article. I wish I had the ability to grind out treatises like that. Looking at other content on the guy's website, he must be like a machine.
kqr · 49m ago
IIRC Gwern lives extremely frugally somewhere remote and is thus able to spend a lot of time on private research.
tux3 · 45m ago
IIRC people funded moving gwern to the bay not too long ago.
pas · 37m ago
lots of time, many iterations, affinity for the hard questions, some expertise in research (and Haskell). oh, and also it helps if someone is funding your little endeavor :)
People didn't always use statistics to discover truths about the world.
This, once developed, just happened to be a useful method. But given the abuse using those methods, and the proliferation of stupidity disguised as intelligence, it's always fitting to question it, and this time with this correlation noise observation.
Logic, fundamental knowledge about domains, you need that first. Just counting things without understanding them in at least one or two other ways, is a tempting invitation for misleading conclusions.
syntacticsalt · 53m ago
I don't disagree with the title, but I'm left wondering what they want us to do about it beyond hinting at causal inference. I'd also be curious what the author thinks of minimum effect sizes (re: Implication 1) and noninferiority testing (re: Implication 2).
st-keller · 1h ago
„This renders the meaning of significance-testing unclear; it is calculating precisely the odds of the data under scenarios known a priori to be false.“
I cannot see the problem in that. To get to meaningful results we often calculate with simplyfied models - which are known to be false in a strict sense. We use Newtons laws - we analyze electric networks based on simplifications - a bank-year used to be 360 days!
Works well.
What did i miss?
thyristan · 4m ago
There is a known maximum error introduced by those simplifications. Put the other way around, Einstein is a refinement of Newton. Special relativity converges towards Newtonian motion for low speeds.
You didn't really miss anything. The article is incomplete, and wrongly suggests that something like "false" even exists in statistics. But really something is only false "with a x% probability of it actually being true nonetheless". Meaning that you have to "statistic harder" if you want to get x down. Usually the best way to do that is to increase the number of tries/samples N. What the article gets completely wrong is that for sufficiently large N, you don't have to care anymore, and might as well use false/true as absolutes, because you pass the threshold of "will happen once within the lifetime of a bazillion universes" or something.
Problem is, of course, that lots and lots of statistics are done with a low N. Social sciences, medicine, and economy are necessarily always in the very-low-N range, and therefore always have problematic statistics. And try to "statistic harder" without being able to increase N, thereby just massaging their numbers enough to get a desired conclusion proved. Or just increase N a little, claiming to have escaped the low-N-problem.
bjornsing · 8m ago
The problem is basically that you can always buy a significant result with money (large enough N always leads to ”significant” result). That’s a serious issue if you see research as pursuit of truth.
whyever · 56m ago
It's a quantitative problem. How big is the error introduced by the simplification?
It's just as I suspected - there are NO coincidences.
petters · 2h ago
If two things e.g. both change over time, they will be correlated. I think it can be good to keep this article in mind
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 17m ago
> For example, while looking at biometric samples with up to thousands of observations, Karl Pearson declared that a result departing by more than 3 standard deviations is “definitely significant.”
Wait. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at basically the exact same time as this Karl Pearson.
Is that why the Sherlock Holmes stories had handwriting analysis so frequently? Was there just pop science going around at the time that like, let's find correlations between anything and anything, and we can see that a criminal mastermind like Moriarty would certainly cross their T's this way and not that way?
andsoitis · 2h ago
there is but a single unfolding, and everything is part of it
jongjong · 23m ago
Also, I'm convinced that the reason humans intuitively struggle to figure out causality is because the vast majority of causes and effects are self-reinforcing cycles and go both ways. There was little evolutionary pressure for us to understand the concept of causality because it doesn't play a strong role in natural selection.
For example, eat a lot and you will gain weight, gain weight and you will feel more hungry and will likely eat more.
Or exercise more and it becomes easier to exercise.
Earning money becomes easier as you have more money.
Public speaking becomes easier as you do it more and the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
Etc...
ctenb · 19m ago
> Public speaking becomes easier as you do it more and the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
> Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
Given different T_zero configs of matter and energies T_current would be different. and there are many pathways that could lead to same physical configuration (position + energies etc) with different (Universe minus cake) configurations.
Also we are assuming there is no non-deterministic processed happening at all.
After all, Feynman showed this is in principle possible, even with local nondeterminism.
(this being a text medium with a high probability of another commenter misunderstanding my intent, I must end this with a note that I am, of course, BSing :)
Everything Is Correlated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797844 - May 2019 (53 comments)
This, once developed, just happened to be a useful method. But given the abuse using those methods, and the proliferation of stupidity disguised as intelligence, it's always fitting to question it, and this time with this correlation noise observation.
Logic, fundamental knowledge about domains, you need that first. Just counting things without understanding them in at least one or two other ways, is a tempting invitation for misleading conclusions.
I cannot see the problem in that. To get to meaningful results we often calculate with simplyfied models - which are known to be false in a strict sense. We use Newtons laws - we analyze electric networks based on simplifications - a bank-year used to be 360 days! Works well.
What did i miss?
You didn't really miss anything. The article is incomplete, and wrongly suggests that something like "false" even exists in statistics. But really something is only false "with a x% probability of it actually being true nonetheless". Meaning that you have to "statistic harder" if you want to get x down. Usually the best way to do that is to increase the number of tries/samples N. What the article gets completely wrong is that for sufficiently large N, you don't have to care anymore, and might as well use false/true as absolutes, because you pass the threshold of "will happen once within the lifetime of a bazillion universes" or something.
Problem is, of course, that lots and lots of statistics are done with a low N. Social sciences, medicine, and economy are necessarily always in the very-low-N range, and therefore always have problematic statistics. And try to "statistic harder" without being able to increase N, thereby just massaging their numbers enough to get a desired conclusion proved. Or just increase N a little, claiming to have escaped the low-N-problem.
Wait. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at basically the exact same time as this Karl Pearson.
Is that why the Sherlock Holmes stories had handwriting analysis so frequently? Was there just pop science going around at the time that like, let's find correlations between anything and anything, and we can see that a criminal mastermind like Moriarty would certainly cross their T's this way and not that way?
For example, eat a lot and you will gain weight, gain weight and you will feel more hungry and will likely eat more.
Or exercise more and it becomes easier to exercise.
Earning money becomes easier as you have more money.
Public speaking becomes easier as you do it more and the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
Etc...
That's saying the same thing twice :)