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ShardPhoenix comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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I am not sure exactly what using this heuristic entails. I certainly understand the motivation behind the heuristic:
But how do you turn that (quite rational IMO) lack of trust into an action principle? I can imagine 4 possible precepts:
Is it rationally consistent to follow all 4 precepts, or is there an inconsistency?
What do those examples have to do with anything? In those cases we actually know the probabilities so they're not Pascal's-Wager-like scenarios.
So, what is the probability that my house will burn? It may depend on whether I start smoking again. I hope the probability of both is low, but I don't know what it is.
I'm not sure exactly what the definition of Pascal's-Wager-like should be. Is there a definition I should read? Should we ask Prase what he meant? I understood the term to mean anything involving small estimated probabilities and large estimated utilities.
We know the probability to a reasonable level of accuracy - eg consider acturial tables. This is different from things like Pascal's wager where the actual probability may vary by many orders of magnitude from our best estimate.
According to the Bayesians, our best estimate is the actual probability. (According to the frequentists, the probabilities in Pascal's wager are undefined.)
What parent means by "We know the probability to a reasonable level of accuracy - eg consider acturial tables" is that it is possible for a human to give a probability without having to do or estimate a very hairy computation to compute a prior probability (the "starting probability" before any hard evidence is taken into account). ADDED. In other words, it should have been a statement about the difficulty of the computation of the probability, not a statement about the existence of the probability in principle.
It should be a statement about the dependence of the probability on the priors. The more the probability depends on the priors, the less reliable it is.
That would be my reading.