bgrah449 comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: CannibalSmith 01 December 2009 04:25PM

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Comment author: bgrah449 02 December 2009 08:24:07PM 2 points [-]

That post (which was interesting and informative - thanks for the link) was about using stories as evidence for use in predicting the actual future, whereas my question is about whether these fictional stories are examples of a general conceptual framework. If I asked if Prisoner's Dilemma was a special case of Newcomb's, I don't think you'd say, "We don't like generalizing from fictional evidence."

Which leads, ironically, to the conclusion that my error was generalizing from evidence which wasn't sufficiently fictional.

Comment author: Morendil 02 December 2009 09:04:54PM 1 point [-]

Perhaps I jumped to conclusions. Downvotes aren't accompanied with explanations, and groping for one that might fit I happened to remember the linked post. More PC than supposing you were dinged just for a religious allusion. (The Peter reference at least required no further effort on my part to classify as fictional; I had to fact-check the Napoleon story, which was an annoyance.)

It still seems the stories you're evoking bear no close relation to Newcomb's as I understand it.