wedrifid comments on Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge - Less Wrong

138 Post author: lukeprog 20 January 2011 08:44PM

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Comment author: shokwave 22 January 2011 05:15:15PM 3 points [-]

More evidence than a negative amount? How much is that worth?

Further up in the thread, I claimed that (in cases like these) people denouncing it is weak evidence in favour.

It has the value of a penny lying on the road: I do not bother to pick it up.

Anecdote: I once refused to pick up a small denomination coin (we don't have pennies in Australia anymore). A friend did and promptly discovered it was a penny, from 1938, and worth two dollars to collectors.

On practical matters, though, this is a case where training will greatly decrease effort and time to pick up (more so than for pennies). If you track how much time is spent on picking up pennies and put a value on that amount of time, and then how much money in pennies you have picked up, you will probably find it not worth it. I expect this weak-evidence-picking-up will prove worth it - if it even slightly addresses the common human problem of incorrectly assessing or entirely discounting large amounts of small evidence, it comes out positive for me.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 January 2011 10:47:40PM 1 point [-]

Anecdote: I once refused to pick up a small denomination coin (we don't have pennies in Australia anymore). A friend did and promptly discovered it was a penny, from 1938, and worth two dollars to collectors.

Still not worth it unless you have a personal interest in coins or expect to find or otherwise collect many such coins. (Of course many people would value the experience at more than $2 just for the novelty and the story.)