Oscar_Cunningham comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: Jack 24 September 2011 05:50:47PM 17 points [-]

Update- She has a date with a girl next week. So... oops. :-)

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 24 September 2011 06:16:36PM 0 points [-]

Polls show that about 10% identify as non-straight, so your initial estimate wasn't bad.

Comment author: Jack 24 September 2011 06:33:30PM *  5 points [-]

One would hope that dating someone would provide enough evidence to make a better estimate than a blind prior.

Comment author: shokwave 25 September 2011 02:49:17AM 3 points [-]

Not necessarily true - it's possible you had an implicit "given that she is straight" at work when you were interpreting evidence. If you conditioned on her being straight it makes perfect sense that you'd have no evidence one way or the other from a blind prior.

(People conditioning on such things is extremely common - for a much less innocuous example, consider what "no thanks, I don't want to" looks like to someone who is conditioning on "this person wants me to")

Comment author: Jack 25 September 2011 03:52:58AM 5 points [-]

You're right, actually. This occurred to me when posting the above. I started from "She's a girl who says she is straight" and then updated down to .9 based on what I learned.