= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CronoDAS comments on Reference class of the unclassreferenceable - 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 (150)
And not much changed between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the beginnings of human culture, either.
returns ball
Isn't that an excellent example of how a reference class forecast can fail miserably?
"Not much changed between 65,000,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago, therefore not much will change between 50,000 years ago and now." is basically the argument, but notice that we've had lots of changes within the past few hundred years, let alone the last 50,000.
The said argument doesn't give certainties, it only gives you chances of something happening in the next 50,000 years based on what happened in the past - the chance correctly being extremely low.
Chance of event more extreme than anything ever happened before depends on your sample size. If your reference class is tiny, you need to assign high probability to extreme events; if your class is huge, probability of an extreme event is low. (The main complication is that samples are almost never close to being independent, and figuring out exact numbers is really difficult in practice. I'm not going to get into this, there might be some estimation method for that based on meta-reference-classes.)