Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong

82 Post author: Alicorn 05 January 2010 09:32PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 January 2010 02:09:34AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 07 January 2010 02:51:50AM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 07 January 2010 03:30:14AM *  1 point [-]

When I was a cryptographer, an information source with a .000001% bulge (information content above randomness) would break a code wide open for me.

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.

Comment author: Cyan 07 January 2010 03:04:47AM 1 point [-]

From a curious non-cryptographer: what size of corpus are you talking about here?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 07 January 2010 03:32:57AM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Cyan 07 January 2010 05:30:55AM 0 points [-]

I didn't mean to call you out -- I was just curious. A curve of data set size versus required bulge would be interesting.