Tom Chivers > Quotes

“your response to new information is influenced by the beliefs you already hold.”
― Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

“probabilities are beliefs; our beliefs, if we act on them, are themselves a kind of bet.”
― Tom Chivers

“Life isn’t chess, a game of perfect information, one that can in theory be “solved.” It’s poker, a game where you’re trying to make the best decisions using the limited information you have.”
― Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

“if my prior beliefs are very different from yours, then the same evidence can lead us to entirely different conclusions. Which is how we can end up with profound, but sincere, disagreements on apparently well-evidenced questions about the climate, or vaccines, or any number of other questions”
― Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

“You may say that you assume perfect ignorance, but there are different kinds of “ignorance,” and you have to pick one”
― Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

“The temptation is to think that if I find something, it will increase my confidence, but if I don’t find anything, it will have no effect. But that’s not how it works. If some piece of evidence would shift your belief by some amount, then the absence of that evidence must shift your belief in the opposite direction, and by an amount proportionate to how strongly you expected the evidence”
― Tom Chivers

“All of our scientific reasoning, he said, is based on an assumption that the future will be like the past. But the only reason that we think the future is like the past is because, in the past, it always has been”
― Tom Chivers

“The questions you can address with frequentist statistics are of no interest to researchers!” says Wagenmakers. “It gets the conditioning wrong. We don’t want to know how surprising the data is if the null hypothesis is true; we want to know the plausibility of the null hypothesis, now that we’ve seen the data. Ultimately, fundamentally, that’s the question.”
― Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

“humans mostly make good decisions—most of the time. They’re kind of fine, in like 90 percent of their decisions. If I want to buy a coffee, I’m capable of going to get one from the café”
― Tom Chivers, Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

“OpenPhil and GiveWell are two organisations run on Rationalist lines that look at the most effective ways to donate money to charity. They’re central to something called the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which is strongly linked to the Rationalist community.”
― Tom Chivers, The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

“But the point is one of probability: we all have a lifetime’s experience of the laws of nature not being broken, and we also have a lifetime’s experience of people saying things that are not true. If someone says, “I saw a dead man come back to life,” most of us would consider it more likely that that someone is wrong, or lying, than that they actually saw a dead man come back to life. So, says Hume, we should ignore that testimony as irrelevant.
But Price, newly armed with Bayes’ theorem, wanted to say that rare events do happen, and that even if you’ve seen the sun rise or the tide come in a million times, you can never be physically certain, in his phrase, that it’ll do so the next time”
― Tom Chivers

“(...) Slate Star Codex, the Rationalist Scott Alexander’s blog, earlier in the conversation. ‘Scott has a very good blog post listing all the AI researchers who think it’s a serious problem,’ Ord told me, which indeed he does: it’s called ‘AI researchers on AI risk’ and was published in 2015. ‘It’s a very long list, including, for example, [DeepMind co-founders] Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg. The world’s biggest AI company is run by people who think this is a real concern.”
― Tom Chivers, The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

“Why would people do this, if they’re trying to find out whether something is true or not? The answer, at least in part, is that scientists, although they do want to find out whether things are true, also want to be promoted, and get tenure, and feed their families, and all those boring things. The basic driver of academic success is summed up in the phrase “publish or perish”
― Tom Chivers