bgrah449 comments on Two Truths and a Lie - Less Wrong

59 Post author: Psychohistorian 23 December 2009 06:34AM

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Comment author: bgrah449 23 December 2009 08:12:52PM 1 point [-]

No, you shouldn't make broad inferences about human behaviour without any data because they are consistent with evolution, unless your application of the theory of evolution is so precise and well-informed that you can consistently pass the Two-Truths-and-a-Lie Test.

This sentence could have beneficially ended after "behavior," "data," or "evolution." The last clause seems to be begging the question - why am I assuming the Two-Truths-and-a-Lie Test is so valuable? Shouldn't the test itself be put to some kind of test to prove its worth?

Comment author: marks 28 December 2009 08:02:31PM 0 points [-]

I think that it should be tested on our currently known theories, but I do think it will probably perform quite well. This is on the basis that its analogically similar to cross validation in the way that Occam's Razor is similar to the information criteria (Aikake, Bayes, Minimum Description Length, etc.) used in statistics.

I think that, in some sense, its the porting over of a statistical idea to the evaluation of general hypotheses.

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