andrewc comments on Guilt by Association - Less Wrong

1 Post author: Annoyance 24 June 2009 05:29PM

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Comment author: andrewc 25 June 2009 02:40:22AM 3 points [-]

In the words of a well known amateur pianist:

If P is true then Q is true Q is true Therefore, P becomes more plausible.

But Annoyance was talking about logic, not plausible reasoning or probability theory, right? In terms of Aristotelian deductive logic the two errors quoted are pretty much equivalent.

Comment author: Annoyance 25 June 2009 01:50:18PM 1 point [-]

The statement "If P, then Q. Q. P is not ruled out." is correct logic. But it conveys very little information.

Comment author: MichaelBishop 25 June 2009 07:12:37PM *  1 point [-]

How much information is conveyed, the amount we need to update our prior for P, upon learning Q, may be considerable. It depends on p(Q|P) and p(Q|~P)