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timtyler comments on Discussion: Yudkowsky's actual accomplishments besides divulgation - Less Wrong
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They constitute anecdotal evidence. Such evidence is usually considered to be pretty low-grade by scientists.
LOL, yes, that's why it weights little. But, see, it still gets to considerably shift one's expectations on the matter because it had a very low probability assigned to its happening, as per Conservation Of Expected Evidence. Let's just say it counts as Rational Evidence, m'kay? Its merit is mostly to open places in Idea Space.
Honestly, so do I. Have you ever played Genius The Transgression? Look, we all know he's full of himself, he has acknowledged this himself, it's a flaw of his, but it's really really irrelevant to the quality of the experiment as evidence.
Where it does matter is that that trait and his militant, sneering, condescending atheism makes for awful, godawful PR. Nevertheless, I've heard he is working on that, and in his rationality book he will try to use less incendiary examples than in his posts here. Still, don't expect it to go away too soon: he strikes me the sort of man who runs largely on pride and idealism and burning shounen passion: such an attitude naturally leads to some intellectual boisterousness: the expression of these symptoms can be toned down, but as long as the cause remains, they will show up every now and then. And if that cause is also what keeps him rollin', I wouldn't have it any other way.
Not m'kay. IIRC, it was complete junk science - an unrecorded, unverified role playing game with no witnesses.
I figure people should update about as much as they would if they were watching a Derren Brown show.
Who's Derren Brown?
Derren Brown
Thank you, but I could have done that myself, I meant "explain, in your own words if possible, what aspects of who this person is are relevant to the discussion". So, he's a Real Life version of The Mentalist. That is very cool. Why shouldn't people get extract useful knowledge from his shows?
Well, go right ahead - if you have not encountered this sort of thing before.
Er. Hmmm... Look, I don't want to sound rude, but could you elaborate on that? As it is, your post provides me with no information at all, except for the fact that you seem to think it's a bad idea...
Well, if you are not familiar with Derren Brown, perhaps my original comment is not for you. Derren is a magician who specialises in mind control. He has some of the skills he claims to have - but to get that across on TV is often difficult - since it is not easy to reassure the audience that you are not using stooges who are in on the tricks.
Oh! Right. Actually that's a very apt comparison!
The evidence is materially better than ordinary anecdote because the fact of the experiment was published before results were available. And it's a demonstration of reasonable possibility, not high probability. It's n=5, but that's materially better than nothing. In fact, taking some reasonable low probability of the human failure rate, such as 1%, the p-value is quite low as well, so it's a statistically significant result.