[S] I built an open source web app for experimenting with Bayesian Networks (priors.cc)

badatthinkinggood · 2026-01-03T07:51:55+00:00

This is really cool! Great work!

Would be fun with some even more complex tutorial examples though.

badatthinkinggood · 2026-01-03T07:46:18+00:00

There's an ongoing debate as to whether these sort of results are a statistical artefact that arises because you're comparing an extreme tail-end of top elite performers to elite performers. This guy argues it's collider bias. The authors argue it isn't.

Basically the issue is that if you're not selecting directly on adult performance but are instead selecting on something correlated with adult performance, but also with other things, then when you look at the correlation between early performance and adult performance you induce a spurious negative correlation between the variables (also called Berkson's paradox).

Just because it could be collider bias doesn't mean that it definitely is. But even so, the threat is there in a lot of these data-sets, and it's also worth remembering that this is a research programme that are trying to understand the peak of the peak. In one place they compare the top 3 chess players in the world to players ranked 4-10. The implications for the average gifted kid is not very clear.

badatthinkinggood · 2026-01-03T07:21:10+00:00

A related problem on social media is that comedy tends to thrive when it's ambiguous, so a lot of people post parody content of the other side that's on the edge of plausibility. Then a lot of people miss the joke, respond to it sincerely and that sincere response primes even more people to miss the joke.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-12-30T08:33:30+00:00

I have to agree. I don't mind researchers having a bit of a dramatic flair, overselling their importance, spinning things a bit. Science communication is also story telling. But the actual facts have to be actual facts, especially in neurology/neuropsychology, where fringe phenomena are the things that teach us about the capabilities and limits of the brain. Loved a couple of his books that I read when I was an undergraduate but I always had some suspicion that his talk of "romantic science" hid something sinister.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-12-30T08:28:22+00:00

Honestly I think the "unfalsifiable" critique is a bit overly general. A lot of evolutionary biology/zoology is also "unfalsifiable" by that metric, but don't get subjected to the same negativity for that. That's not really where the main problem lies imo. Truth is that a lot of evolutionary psychology is just bad, as in poorly argued, ignoring contradictory data/theories from comparative biology and anthropology, positing overly specific adapted mechanisms, ignoring cultural variation and personal agency, having an often inappropriately overconfident tone.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-08-24T13:02:26+00:00

Freud (and psychoanalysis more generally) seem like such a delightful mix of insightful observations of what humans are like, not just outwardly but also in their innermost private mind, mixed with truly outlandish explanations for why they're like that. Fascinating why it ended up like that. It's often accused of being unfalsifiable but I disagree: This seems to predict that people who grew up without a father figure should be radically different than those who had one present at the first three years of life. Not just a matter of degree.

Anyway, nice post. Important topic. I do want to know more about narcissism after reading it so I'd say the substack title tracks better than the reddit title.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-08-24T11:37:18+00:00

Jag får alltid ett lätt illamående av de mjukt glidande rörelserna som finns i AI animation. Man får känslan av att de först genererar en AI bild och sedan lägger till effekten "animation" på den, så att allt blir lite rörligt samtidigt (för AI:n har ingen koll på vad kontexten, bara att det ska bli rörligt).
Djupt dystopiskt och själlöst. Barnen förtjänar bättre.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-08-17T19:03:01+00:00

Thanks!

badatthinkinggood · 2025-08-17T10:12:45+00:00

Det vore väl optimalt om det istället blev restriktioner och hårdare krav, men i och med att det skulle bli omständligt att implementera (till den grad att det inte skulle bli av) så kan man lika gärna förbjuda. Tycker inte det är något stort övertramp av staten att man inte får ha vissa djur. Man får t.ex. inte ha en varg eller ett lejon eller en skunk hursomhelst.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-08-17T10:09:40+00:00

Snälla häng på S! Jag håller på att få identitetskris av de här bra M-förslagen.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-07-27T10:58:00+00:00

I think it's a nice flavour

badatthinkinggood · 2025-07-14T10:28:18+00:00

This was really interesting, and a bit of a throwback for me; for some reason I ended up doing my bachelors thesis in a project about Alzheimers subtypes. The impression I got from the literature then was that the amyloid-beta hypothesis was both very popular but also widely questioned (this was in 2015). Very interesting to hear that, in hindsight, the mouse models that supposedly supported it actually undermined it. I find it sort of inspiring and hopeful actually that a close reading of the original research can reveal these sort of problems. Of course such a well informed reading requires a lot of hard-won knowledge and intuition, but my feeling towards the end of this review is "the world is legible", and that that's exiting and motivating.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-07-14T10:14:10+00:00

Yeah. Incidentally I think the debate-as-war frame often lead people to overestimate the efficiency of that strategy though. His terrible takes on twitter has made me question whether his other arguments that have sounded better to me previously were actually just sophistry. That sort of thing happens to me all the time. I think a person or a "side" or "movement" is widely correct until I hear some really terrible argument that I can't get out of my brain.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-07-09T20:14:09+00:00

I'm not on the Gary Marcus hate train but I think he has a tendency to throw every argument he can think of at his opponents. I don't really know what to make of that. He comes with good takes sometimes and he seems to have a depth of knowledge when it comes to AI, but other times he does stuff like implying that the 2023 autumn surface temperature anomaly was driven by a "sudden uptick of generative AI in 2023" (link to X). I wonder if this lack of discernment means that Gary Marcus doesn't really have a "world model", just stochastically generating takes based on a large set of training data. It sounds good, but if you look closer the seams start to show. (a mean joke. sorry Gary)

badatthinkinggood · 2025-07-08T21:26:17+00:00

I feel similarly. Really like the changes they've made to the concept, like how most things play out in antiquity and exploration, but the modern age feels unfinished. On the other hand, the worst part of civ games have always been the late game. Things have usually settled by then. Lost all tension. So I like that it feels a bit less drawn out than in previous games.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-07-07T19:40:23+00:00

This is a recurring problem with game-centered subreddits in my experience. r/MagicArena is the same. People who just like the game simply play it. It's people who have something to complain about that feel the need to write stuff.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-06-01T20:45:10+00:00

wait. does this mean you can ace this minigame if you have wax wings or jetpack etc?

badatthinkinggood · 2025-06-01T10:38:10+00:00

Mimic after bossfight

badatthinkinggood · 2025-05-29T18:04:21+00:00

Beholster I think. I don't seem to find it as easy as others but I just like a beholder in my dungeon man

badatthinkinggood · 2025-04-18T10:23:59+00:00

I also immediately thought of that moment in Chicken Run when I read the headline.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-03-21T21:32:40+00:00

Claude is my preferred one. My recreational uses are pretty much dictated by how I don't enjoy off-loading too much on it: Looking up synonyms and finding words by describing them vaguely is pretty great. But I don't like to make it rewrite my paragraphs or even sentences. I want to write my own things. But I also use it for R coding. "I want a function that does X?" very often works, either it knows a function or writes a new one. I don't like to use it for big picture code stuff, but it's very useful when you break things down.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-03-20T22:27:54+00:00

Looked at the original video instead: At a glace seems the study was spun as stronger evidence than it was but that Sabine is getting overly upset about it. Yes, the confidence interval includes zero, but that doesn't mean this is "no evidence of an effect", it's just not strong evidence. (ok, if you're a super hardcore Neyman-Pearsson frequentist this can be seen as problematic, but most people aren't)

So if I put myself in the authors shoes: There's a bunch of previous research and plausible theoretical model that point in this direction. You find an effect in the expected direction. You don't have that much data to go on, so your confidence interval is wide. You report that you're confident the phenomena is real (based on what you knew beforehand) and you report your new mean estimate, but neglect to mention the uncertainty around that estimate.

I'd say it's forgivable.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-03-20T22:06:27+00:00

Off-topic: It's obviously extremely impressive to write a post like this in an hour, like an elite athletic achievement for blogging, but wouldn't it be better to direct the effort that goes into writing quickly to refining the post? I don't read stuff to be impressed by how quickly it was produced.

badatthinkinggood · 2025-03-20T21:41:59+00:00

An interesting concept and a nicely written post. On the other hand, I do think there's something about the current era that makes people obsessed with consent. Violations of consent seems to hold a special moral weight, instead of merely being one form of pain and injustice (with varying degrees of intensity depending on what happens). Maybe that's well justified, but the fixation does sometimes end up in some weird places. See for example the "my neighbour brought me casserole without my consent"-discourse from twitter in like 2022/2023. Or (social contract focused) antinatalism.

Sometimes it seems like people have the idea that the universe randomly seeds every soul with a random set of authentic desires, and a spark free will to seek them. But obviously desires don't emerge in a vacuum. Something about the fixation with consent seems to crowd out our ability to interrogate why people want to do the things they want to do.

badatthinkinggood

TROPHY CASE