Technologos comments on The Prediction Hierarchy - Less Wrong

21 Post author: RobinZ 19 January 2010 03:36AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (37)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 19 January 2010 05:54:49AM 5 points [-]

Why, when you consider the case where you calculated the odds of winning the lottery incorrectly, do you increase rather than decrease the odds?

In any case, with a lottery, you do know the odds of winning; they're stated on the ticket.

Comment author: Technologos 19 January 2010 09:01:36AM 1 point [-]

Agreed--the trick is that being wrong "only once" is deceptive. I may be wrong more than once on a one-in-forty-million chance. But I may also be wrong zero times in 100 million tries, on a problem as frequent and well-understood as the lottery, and I'm hesitant to say that any reading problems I may have would bias the test toward more lucrative mistakes.