Oscar_Cunningham comments on Utility is unintuitive - Less Wrong

-5 Post author: jsteinhardt 09 December 2010 05:39AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (66)

Comments (66)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 10 December 2010 10:07:12AM 0 points [-]

I think what I've probably just demonstrated is that I'm subject to cognitive biases involving small percentage chances... I think my mind is just rounding 1% to "close enough to zero as makes no difference."

Maybe, but I find it easier to fall for the opposite bias, the one known as "There's still a chance, right?"

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 December 2010 07:31:46PM 3 points [-]

(nods) Sadly, my succeptability to rounding very small probabilities up when I want them to be true is not inversely correlated with my succeptability to rounding very small probabilities down when I want to ignore them. Ain't motivated cognition grand?

I do find that I can subvert both of these failure modes by switching scales, though. That is, if I start thinking in "permil" rather than percent, all of a sudden a 1% chance (that is, a 10 permil chance) stops seeming quite so negligible.

Comment author: orthonormal 17 January 2011 10:02:16PM 0 points [-]

if I start thinking in "permil" rather than percent, all of a sudden a 1% chance (that is, a 10 permil chance) stops seeming quite so negligible.

Huh, that's a pretty neat hack!

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit