Sblast comments on Your Evolved Intuitions - Less Wrong

15 Post author: lukeprog 05 May 2011 04:21PM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 05 May 2011 07:09:31PM *  3 points [-]

I could understand wider impulses as relatively probable & testable, but "sacrifice themselves for three brothers but not one", that is one huge kind of a detalied leap. Since when by the way observation is enough? You need to determine the actual cause from all the other possible ones.

You are right that the "three brothers but not one" bit is detailed. That is why observing such specific numbers would provide strong support for the theory, even if you didn't "determine the actual cause from all the other possible ones". Mere observation is enough. That is the essence of Bayesian epistemology.

In general, suppose that a theory T says that a highly-specific (and hence a priori improbable) observation E is likely, and then E is actually observed. Then that observation makes the probability of T increase by a very large factor. And the probability of T increases more, the more specific E is. In symbols, if p(E) is small, but p(E|T) is large, then the ratio p(T|E) / p(T) is very large. This is a direct corollary of Bayes's theorem: p(T|E) = p(T) * p(E|T) / p(E).

Note that this applies even if you merely observed E, but didn't determine what caused E to happen. (However, if you subsequently did determine what caused E, and that cause differed from what T said it would be, then T would lose whatever favored status it had gained.)