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dansmith comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong
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I suppose it depends what kinds of decisions you're talking about making. (eg keeping AIs from destroying humanity.) I was thinking along the lines of day-to-day decision making, in which people generally manage to survive for decades in spite of ridiculously flawed beliefs -- so it seems there are lots of situations where performance doesn't appear to degrade nearly so sharply.
At any rate, I guess I'm with ciphergoth, the more interesting question is why 99% accurate is "maybe maybe" okay, but 95% is "hell no". Where do those numbers come from?
Someone who gets it 99% right is useful to me, someone who gets it 95% right is so much work to deal with that I usually don't bother.
No one gets it 99% right. (Modulo my expectation that we are speaking only of questions of a minimal difficulty; say, at least as difficult as the simplest questions that the person has never considered before.)
When I was a cryptographer, an information source with a .000001% bulge (information content above randomness) would break a code wide open for me. Lack of bias was much more important than % right.
In that case, a second information source of that quality wouldn't have been that much use to you.
The first person who gets it 95% right would be very valuable. But there are diminishing returns.
From a curious non-cryptographer: what size of corpus are you talking about here?
You're onto me. Yes, that's with a large corpus. The kind you get when people encrypt non-textual information. So, I lied a little. You need a bigger bulge with shorter messages.
I didn't mean to call you out -- I was just curious. A curve of data set size versus required bulge would be interesting.