= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_Nesov comments on Guess Again - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (28)
I was pretty skeptical about your Bead Jar post, but now have changed my mind. This stuff is interesting, even disturbing. In the bead jar game it seems that one should assign tiny credence to "cerulean" and thus huge credence to "non-cerulean", but not be surprised when "non-cerulean" fails to occur. Do you have some kind of general theory of when surprise occurs or should occur?
IIRC, the conclusion was that "surprise" is when some low-probability complex hypothesis suddenly rises to prominence. Thus it's not something that describes one of 100000 same-probability events happening, but something that describes one winning a lottery 10 times in a row, or an old lame horse winning the race, in which case you start suspecting that something is going on. If a low-probability event doesn't give a hint that something unexpected is going on, there is no surprise.
The emotion of surprise itself is possibly an adaptation that tells the brain to pay attention, to try to figure out what that new unexpected phenomenon might be and what else that entails.