Sewing-Machine comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong

23 Post author: multifoliaterose 19 August 2010 10:47PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 25 August 2010 01:37:42AM 0 points [-]

This is a small point but "E includes complex claim C" does not imply that the (for instance, Kolmogorov) complexity of E is as large as the Kolmogorov complexity of C. The complexity of the digits of square root of 2 is pretty small, but they contain strings of arbitrarily high complexity.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 25 August 2010 01:56:07AM 2 points [-]

E includes C implies that K(C) <= K(E) + K(information needed to locate C within E). In this case K(information needed to locate C within E) seems small enough not to matter to the overall argument, which is why I left it out. (Since you said "this is a small point" I guess you probably understand and agree with this.)

Comment author: [deleted] 25 August 2010 02:09:51AM 1 point [-]

Actually no I hadn't thought of that. But I wonder if the amount of information it takes to locate "lots of people are muslims" within E is as small as you say. My particular E does not even contain that much information about Islam, and how people came to believe it, but it does contain a model of how people come to believe weird things in general. Is that a misleading way of putting things? I can't tell.