faul_sname comments on What Cost for Irrationality? - Less Wrong

59 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 01 July 2010 06:25PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 07 July 2010 04:53:17AM 1 point [-]

To clarify; I think you should be ridiculously confident, but not as confident as your reasoning by itself would justify.

I agree (and voted accordingly). The influence of the direct probability I calculated would be utterly overwhelmed in my confidence calculation compared to meta-uncertainty. I certainly wouldn't go as far as placing 1:10,000 odds, for example, even though my calculations would put it at 1^(-lots). In fact, I can't even assign extreme odds to something as obvious as there is no Jehova, except for signalling purposes. I know enough about the way me (and my species) think that assigning extreme probabilities would be ridiculously overconfident. (How this relates to things like Pascal's wager is a different and somewhat more philosophically difficult problem.)

Comment author: faul_sname 05 August 2012 04:09:34AM *  1 point [-]

1^(-lots)

This would be 1.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 August 2012 05:26:25AM 0 points [-]

Something does seem to be missing in that expression.