PaulAlmond comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: PaulAlmond 28 August 2010 10:20:07PM 1 point [-]

I didn't say you ignored previous correspondence with reality, though.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 August 2010 01:09:42AM 1 point [-]

That isn't Perplexed's point. Let's say that as of this moment all crows that have been observed are black, so both of his hypotheses fit the data. Why should "all crows are black" be assigned a higher prior than "All crows are black except <270 pages specifying the exceptions>"? Based on cousin_it's post, I don't see any reason to do that.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 August 2010 01:02:02AM 0 points [-]

So, to revive this discussion: if we must distribute probability mass evenly because we cannot place emphasis on simplicity, shouldn't our priors be almost zero for every hypothesis? It seems to me that the "underdetermination" problem makes it very hard to use priors in a meaningful way.