Daniel_Burfoot comments on Frugality and working from finite data - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Snowyowl 03 September 2010 09:37AM

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 03 September 2010 02:22:09PM 5 points [-]

Imagine a certain rare galactic event A that occurs with probability 0.5 whenever a certain set of conditions are met

It seems like this is an indirect description of the Black Swan problem. Consider an astrophysical event so unlikely that it has a 50% chance of occurring in the entire light cone. Theory A completely prohibits the event, while theory B assigns the event a very small probability. If the event does not occur in the observation set, there is no way to distinguish between A and B.