benelliott comments on Rationality Quotes: March 2011 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alexandros 02 March 2011 11:14AM

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Comment author: benelliott 06 March 2011 05:42:32PM 1 point [-]

The intended meaning of "extraordinary evidence" in the original quote is simply "very strong evidence" or for a more Bayesian way of putting it "evidence which would be phenomenally unlikely if the claim in question was incorrect".

Comment author: Thomas 07 March 2011 07:37:03AM *  -2 points [-]

The intended meaning of "extraordinary evidence" in the original quote is simply "very strong evidence"

Not at all! For many ordinary claims like "the Sun will rise tomorrow" we have quite strong evidences, while we lack that strong evidences about some more extraordinary claims.

Comment author: benelliott 07 March 2011 08:04:42AM 0 points [-]

The whole point of the quote is that if we lack extraordinary (which means extraordinarily strong) evidence about an extraordinary claim we shouldn't believe it. I stand by that idea. Therefore I suspect all of your counterexamples are bogus.

Comment author: Thomas 07 March 2011 08:36:38AM -1 points [-]

"You can't travel faster than light" is quite an extraordinary claim, which has not as strong evidences, as the ordinary "an apple falls down if you drop it" has.

You misunderstood.

Comment author: benelliott 07 March 2011 08:59:08AM *  0 points [-]

"You can't travel faster than light" has lots of strong evidence for it, or at any rate it is a very high-probability consequence of a theory which has lots of strong evidence for it. Its not even that extraordinary, it doesn't contradict anything else we know to be true and it refers to a domain which we have no experience of (travelling at a speed measured in millions of meters per second) so the fact that its non-intuitive shouldn't be so significant. Compare that with a genuinely extraordinary claim like "homoeopathy works" which is made extraordinary by dint of the fact that if its true we have to throw out the whole of physics, which has plenty of evidence for it.

It doesn't have as much evidence as "an apple falls down if you drop it" but this fact is irrelevant. Bayesian probability is not a competition, just because we have more evidence for B than for A doesn't mean we can't have enough evidence for both of them. The situation would be different if A and B were mutually contradictory, but since they clearly aren't in this case the fact that one has stronger evidence does not contradict the fact that the other still has strong evidence.

Its simple Bayesian logic, if a claim is extraordinary (meaning implausible/very low prior) then to confirm it you need extraordinary evidence (meaning extraordinarily strong). Any such evidence is unlikely by definition, but it does not have to be weird in the sense of being non-intuitive.

This is the last post I'll make in this discussion because frankly this argument has become stupid. I seem to recall other discussions with you that went the same way so we obviously bring out the worst in each other.