cousin_it comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: gjm 07 October 2010 09:12PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 October 2010 10:58:38PM 4 points [-]

Saw someone else do it already.

Actually this is a fallacy I've seen coming up a lot in discussions of the fic. People are so enchanted with being able to come up with many possibilities that they forget to ask which are the probable possibilities. Sure, the laws change somewhat when you're matching wits with an author instead of reality; but when it comes to people talking about lots of other possible explanations for the Mendelian pattern in wizard genetics, for example, they seem to be doing a Culture of Objections thing where they declare victory as soon as they come up with an overlooked possibility that can be used to reject the paper, never mind the prior probability on it.

I've seen this answer gotten, so I know it's gettable.

Comment author: cousin_it 25 October 2010 07:49:25AM *  5 points [-]

Seconding Nesov's point. If you ask people to guess the number you have in mind, and someone says "three" (while others say "one" or "five" or "a hundred"), and you did in fact have in mind "three", that doesn't prove the answer is "gettable". Not saying that it isn't in fact gettable, only that you need a stricter test. For example, sometimes ask someone else to post a comment with the correct answer (or do it yourself using an alias) and see how it fares compared to other hypotheses.