Comment on 9/11 Survey

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:05:38 GMT

I disagree. (I am a downvoter.)

Consider Bayes. The prior proportion of people who do not think his conspiracy theory is crazy is 0.06, according to the article he linked to in the OP. (This assumes that your prior is equal to the US population, and since the significant majority of LW is American (I think) this is a reasonable prior. Even if I'm wrong, it's unlikely to affect the results significantly.) Roughly twenty people replied to the conspiracy theory thread without mentioning that they thought 9/11 was a conspiracy, which seems a highly likely response, if you actually thought that. Browsing through rolands post history, I find a number of users who have explicitly said they disagree with his theory: wedrifid, Eliezer, Mitchell_Porter, lessdazed, WrongBot, Constant, Blueberry, Nisan, mattnewport, Alicorn, simplicio, Jayson_Virissimo, retired_phlebotomist, quanticle, and... well. That's as far as I care to go. But I think it's pretty clear that roland had enough Bayesian evidence prior to making his post that virtually everyone here thinks his conspiracy theory is crazy.

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