gwern comments on Take heed, for it is a trap - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Zed 14 August 2011 10:23AM

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Comment author: gwern 16 August 2011 11:54:46PM *  9 points [-]

"If you know nothing, 50% prior probability" still strikes me as just plain wrong.

That strikes me as even weirder and wrong. So given a variable A which could be every possible variable, I should assign it... 75% and ~A 25%? or 25%, and make ~A 75%? Or what? - Isn't 50% the only symmetrical answer?

Basically, given a single variable and its negation, isn't 1/2 the max-entropy distribution, just as a collection of n variables has 1/n as the max-ent answer for them?