Food for Thought is a series of events, where we discuss philosophical and practical questions of EA in small groups over food and drinks: We are exploring effective altruism one bite at a time (at the moment, it's rather one sip at a time, until we've found an indoor location that allows us to bring food). EA newcomers are welcome; studying the suggested material is encouraged but not required, please RSVP.
Topic
This time we want to get practical again! Join us for an evening about probabilistic thinking. We will prepare a couple of small exercises and games to calibrate and learn more about this approach of viewing the world. For those of you who'd rather come for a discussion, there will also be room for a meta discussion and the question: how well does this approach serve us as an EA commiunity?
Suggested Reading
The Bayesian Mindset: https://www.cold-takes.com/the-bayesian-mindset/
Where/How/What
Since it's now too cold for a picnic in the park, we are going to meet at Atopia. It is easy to reach via Ringbahn (Prenzlauer Allee), M10 (Prenzlauer Allee/Danziger Staße) or M2 (Fröbelstraße).
What to bring
Some change to buy a drink - they don't accept card payment at Atopia.
Sorry for the bad formatting - it doesnt work currently for me. I've tried it on several browsers.
Thank you all for joining, I hope you enjoyed it as well! My delay getting home was less severe than on the way to Atopia but still a lot more than 1 minute and today there were white patches on the grass close to the S-Bahn ^^
A couple of random points connected to yesterday's discussion. I would be glad to hear your thoughts:
For me the best thing I learned yesterday was how beneficial it can actually be to discuss a question, based on the probability different people assign to a certain outcome. I hadn't realised this before.
Here is an article about probabilistic reasoning that Isa and I discussed during preparation as well, maybe you'll find it as interesting as we did: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BWLAzZEA5K7HPr2CL/probabilities-prioritization-and-bayesian-mindset
And, last point: I have a question. Is anyone aware of any good research on the topic of how well humans perform when making decisions on guessed probabilities in complex cenarios where the whole state space is (other than in a game scenario) not known to anyone.
Hi everyone,
for newcomers @Atopia: How do we find each other?
See you soon,
Niklas
Hi Niklas, sorry for not responding! I somehow did not get any notification about this. Glad you found as anyway :)
Hi, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and was struck by the diversity of perspectives shared. It was fascinating how seemingly unrelated questions—such as the probability of humanity’s survival until the end of the century and the likelihood of someone born after 2001 living to 150—intertwined in surprising ways ;) For further exploration of such complex scenarios, my favorites are “Noise” by Daniel Kahneman and “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, as they offer profound insights into judgment, probability, and uncertainty. 🖖 Olli