Have no fear - your comment is clear.
(By the way, I do not think that claiming arrival at a valid complaint via the wrong reason is offering much defense for my friends.)
I'll give you that one, with a caveat: if an algorithm consistently outputs correct data rather than incorrect, it's a heuristic, not a bias. They lose points either way for failing to provide valid support for their complaint.
I have not tested it in the sense that I sought to eliminate any form of weird contamination. But I have lots of anecdotal evidence. One such, very true, story: [truncated for brevity]
Yes, those anecdotes constitute the sort of data I requested - your hypothesis now outranks mine in my sorting.
(Incidentally, If you had made a top-level post, I would want to see this kind of prediction-based elimination of alternative hypotheses.
I am having trouble understanding this. Can you say it again with different words?
When I read your initial comment, I felt that you had proposed an overly complicated explanation based on the amount of evidence you presented for it. I felt so based on the fact that I could immediately arrive at a simpler (and more plausible by my prior) explanation which your evidence did not refute. It is impressive, although not necessary, when you can anticipate my plausible hypothesis and present falsifying evidence; it is sufficient, as you have done, to test both hypotheses fairly against additional data when additional hypotheses appear.
Ah, okay. That makes more sense. I am still experimenting with the amount of predictive counter-arguing to use. In the past I have attempted to so by adding examples that would address the potential objections. This hasn't been terribly successful. I have also directly addressed the points and people still brought them up... so I am pondering how to fix the problem.
But, anyway. The topic at hand still interests me. I assume there is a term for this that matches the behavior. I could come up with some fancy technical definition (perceived present ownership ...
We've had these for a year, I'm sure we all know what to do by now.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.