Jonathan_Graehl comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MarkusRamikin 02 October 2011 09:05AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 02 October 2011 01:15:03PM 5 points [-]

I estimate, that a currently working and growing superintelligence has a probability in a range of 1/million to 1/1000. I am at least 50% confident that it is so.

The probability is already just an expression of your own uncertainty. Giving a confidence interval over the probability does not make sense.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 04 October 2011 11:51:18PM *  0 points [-]

I agree. Perhaps he means to say that his opinion is based on very little evidence and is "just a hunch".

I do think that in fitting a model to data, you can give meaningful confidence intervals for parameters of those models which correspond to probabilities (e.g. p(heads) for a particular coin flipping device). But that's not relevant here.