ata comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

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Comment author: ata 24 February 2011 08:52:28PM *  2 points [-]

I think the phrase "entity that actively rewards one for giving a higher probability..." made the point clear enough. If my state of information implies a 1% probability that a large asteroid will strike Earth in the next fifty years, then I would be best off assigning 1% probability to that, because the asteroid's behaviour isn't hypothesized to depend at all on my beliefs about it. If my state of information implies a 1% probability that there is a God who will massively reward only those who believe in his existence with 100% certainty, and who will punish all others, then that's an entity that's actively rewarding certain people based on having overconfident probability assignments; so the difficulty is in the possibility and desirability of treating one's own probability assignments as just another thing to make decisions about.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 February 2011 09:23:49PM 0 points [-]

I understand where the difficulty comes from, my complaint was with justification of the presence of the difficulty given in Joshua's comment. Maybe you're right, and the onus of justification was on the word "actively", even though it wasn't explained.