Type I & Type II Error
This article is a stub. You can help us by editing this page and expanding it.Type I and Type II errors on The Basics Guide
I've watched the WikiLeaks video. In part what we are watching is the tradeoff between Type I and II error in favor of low US casualties.
The boy who cries "WMD" & the boy who cries "false flag" are kindred spirits.
I'm more the boy who cries "Balance type I & type II error."
1/ An abstraction of many twitter arguments I see:
Person A: âThis form of Type II error is intolerable & must be stopped.â
Person B: âYouâre proposing a nightmare of Type I error! Thus I refuse to even acknowledge Type II error.â
Person A: âWhat Type I error? Youâre a dolt!â
2/
Person C: âCan you see that itâs a question of balancing Type I & Type II error?â
Person D: âYou canât simply balance them b/c of rights. Itâs not an unconstrained optimization.â
Persons A&B: âWow! You clowns C & D really donât get it.â
Person C to D in DMs:âGood point D.â
End/
DM of D to C: âYours as well C. I like your tweets which I often disagree with. Would be up for lunch if yourâre ever in Lagos.â
DM of C to D: âSame here if youâre ever stateside. Great meeting you.â
[Three days later on Twitter...]
Person A: âEnd all Type II error MFs!!
My simple take on conspiracies: Looking at the @AndrewYang @MSNBC series, itâs clear that this is not a repeating accident. However what weâre really worrying about is this. What happens if we start to acknowledge these cryptic power moves? Does the world become Qanon & InfoWars?
If we teach COINTELPRO do we start believing in Reptilians? If we acknowledge the Powell Memo, do we believe in Illuminati next? Does questioning Epsteinâs death and any connection of his to intelligence communities legitimize all of Pizzagate? Does Jean Seberg destroy all news?
Does our suspicion that the Warren Report was used to silence questions around JFK open up the idea that our government is illegitimate when it releases findings?
Sadly, the answer is that weâre falling into 3 types. Conspiracy deniers, Conspricay nuts & a tiny third group.
The deniers fear legitimizing deep questions & concern about ground truth, interests, power, leverage, cryptic organizations, etc. Better to avoid the slippery slope without near certain evidence they say.
Nuts want hidden order everywhere. They want to be in on a secret world.
The third group (mine) has had it with both of these groups. We know enough to discuss Type I vs Type II error. We donât know whatâs going on most of the time so the nutters make us crazy. We also donât believe that Jeffrey Epsteinâs coverage is normal. We can map irregularity.
We also know we can be wrong & donât think that makes us nutters or dupes. Itâs Type I vs Type II error & we refuse to get all weird because it involves conspiracies. This is a normal thing to think about unless you know ABSOLUTELY nothing about the history of proven conspiracy!
Two of the most important issues at the moment in this space are about the news:
A) What is the explanation for the bizarre coverage of Jeffrey Epstein?
B) What is the explanation for the bizarre coverage every 4 years of popular candidates outside the system gaining traction?
We know enough to know that something is wildly off in both cases but we donât know exactly what. That makes both the Nutters & the deniers extremely uncomfortable with us. We may be near certain something is off like nutters but reject detailed theories w/o proof like deniers.
My conclusion is simple: consider joining us. If youâve outgrown radical pro-life v pro-choice. If youâre too smart for pure capitalism vs communism. If you canât get the old camps to work for you, consider taking Type I vs II approach to conspiracies. As you would anything else.
People ask what I believe about Autonomous Zones free of police.
I predict they will be Beautiful.
After that initial phase, I predict that this period will be followed by either horror or a reinvention of policing with its usual problems that come from Type I v Type II error.
Dear @michaelshermer,
Thanks for this. Very sober. I myself also donât find the authenticated videos so far released compelling. But I do find your challenge of âno isolated discontinuous innovationâ quite interesting!
Might I propose a friendly debate among friendly skeptics?
Dear @EricRWeinstein Please see my argument for why UAPs cannot be foreign assets capable of physics & aerodynamics attributed to UAPs that if true would be decades or centuries ahead of us. History shows no nations/companies of comp development so lag. https://quillette.com/2021/06/03/understanding-the-unidentified/
First of all, I am concerned that the paradigm of being scientifically or technologically âcenturies aheadâ is all wrong. This came up in a phone call with our buddy @SamHarrisOrg.
Q: How many centuries ahead is 1952-3 from 1900? Iâd have guessed âmanyâ (not .5) and been wrong.
Next challenge: doesnât your line of reasoning prove that âRenaissance Technologiesâ is either a fraud or a front? Their Medallion Fund is otherwise a long term unbreached secret, discontinuous from any other know investment fund seemingly thousands of years ahead of competitors.
Now Iâve had the odd question about Renaissance (front not fraud) for just this reason. But either way, itâs either a counter example to your claims on discontinuous innovation if it is merely a fund or a counter-example to your secrecy claims if it is our secret physics program.
Next: there are really two metrics on innovations.
Metric I: How big the incremental jump in difficulty.
Metric II: How big the jump in what is unlocked.
The great fear is that a small jump measured by 1 leading to an ENORMOUS jump in as measured by II.
You are, to me, arguing powerfully that certain people canât exist: Rodney Mullen, Edward Van Halen, Bob Beamon, Dick Fosbury, Hiroji Satoh, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc.
They all exhibited the âa little unlocks a lotâ paradigm with Zero-Day exploits that were each decisive.
And that brings us to theoretical physics. Beginning around 1982 , the son of the worldâs top employed anti-gravity researcher(?!) of the 1950s turned in what may be the most impressive 15yr output in the history of the subject by my estimation. How can I begin to explain this?
Itâs not physics exactly. But Edward Witten w support from a small number of folks rewrote Quantum Field Theory as geometry. If Einstein geometrized gravity, then Witten geometrized Quantum Field theory (everything else).
Now, all that change has so far unlocked exactly nothing.
But itâs not that nothing happened in physics. While we were pretending that string theory was working, Witten & Co revolutionized our mathematical framework. Think of it as an enormous amount of unrealized gains. Pent up genius & power looking for its 1st application to the đ.
Now let me show you how I could get discontinuous innovation if I were China or Russia. I donât know those systems as well so Iâll use the US example.
We know most of the top minds. We pretend that there is a lot of subjectivity about this for social reasons but China wouldnât.
If I thought like CCP, Iâd create a lavish secret theoretical physics program modeled on the Russian Sharashka system. The key would be to get it to look like something else. A boring Tech company or some weird Chinese fund to disguise the reason for the secretive lavish campus.
[Digression: If the US were smarter, weâd do it by setting up a mythic secret $B hedge fund that employs top differential geometers, theoretical physicists & ML experts by a national lab & an off brand university w/ inexplicably strong geometry & physics. But enough crazy talk..]
If CCP could today repeat what Witten (& friends) did building off Geometric Quantum Field Thy, the US would have Zero clue what it unlocks. Even by your own incrementalist theory. It might unlock absolutely nothing. Or passage to the stars via additional degrees of freedom. đ¤ˇââď¸
One last point. I released such a theory. Could well be wrong.
But I can tell you I should have received a call from DOE. Because calls are cheap and relevant trained PhDs are *very* finite. The US should track every geometer, General Relativist, and Particle Theorist working.
You donât have to take a position on me or GU. You can ask Wolfram or Lisi or Barbour or Deutsche or anyone outside the system whether such calls are placed. They are not. No one *in* the system believes in wild discontinuous change from *outside* the system. As per your article.
Which is to say weâre not monitoring. Maybe we think thatâs a waste of taxpayer dollars. Maybe we think that a Grisha Perelman of physics is impossible.
How much does a phone call cost if a researcher is wrong vs not bothering if theyâre right? Price the Type I & II error. Nuts.
Discontinuous innovation is always unlikely. But never impossible.
We are both skeptics. But this UFO story is weird beyond belief Michael. I canât think of a single story to fit to these reports Iâm hearing about.
I welcome your thoughts. As always.
Warm regards,
Eric