prase comments on 5 Axioms of Decision Making - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Vaniver 01 December 2011 10:22PM

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Comment author: prase 02 December 2011 11:13:33AM *  10 points [-]

it didn't even occur to me that people might not know their names

Seriously? I see these damned horses for the first time in life. Not only I don't know their names, but it is hard to distinguish them visually. And I put quite a big probability on the hypothesis that 95% of people whom I personally know are unfamiliar with this as well.

whereas I did think long and hard before going with that as my only example

Couldn't you go with apple, pizza, bicycle, broken watch, pen, or whatever sort of items whose names are known? It would perhaps be too ordinary, but your present choice really makes it harder.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 09 December 2011 05:41:39PM *  5 points [-]

And I put quite a big probability on the hypothesis that 95% of people whom I personally know are unfamiliar with this as well.

I didn't know them either, but this post was one of the last straws that broke the back of my resistance made me start watching the series.

(It's good, by the way!)

Comment author: Vaniver 03 December 2011 07:36:07PM 5 points [-]

Seriously?

Yes. I'm not sure why.

Couldn't you go with apple, pizza, bicycle, broken watch, pen, or whatever sort of items whose names are known? It would perhaps be too ordinary, but your present choice really makes it harder.

Future posts will not re-use this example. I wanted to use lots of pictures for this one to make sure the steps were clear, and found it easier to motivate myself to do that with ponies.

Comment author: Bugmaster 02 December 2011 09:46:11PM 1 point [-]

Hmm, that's interesting, because I personally thought that the ponies were well designed. They each have a unique color scheme, and a distinct silhouette. Guess I was wrong, though.

Comment author: prase 03 December 2011 10:42:34AM 0 points [-]

I don't say they are not well designed. Perhaps this is the best they could do while maintaining their artistic style, or they didn't try to optimise distinctiveness in the first place.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 02 December 2011 07:13:32PM 3 points [-]

How hard are they to distinguish visually? They are each dominated by a single (unique) color. Is my model of visual perception wrong?

Comment author: prase 02 December 2011 09:37:26PM *  1 point [-]

The colours are "similar", in that they are all pastel tones, and I have probably not good memory for colours. Now when I am looking on the ponies for the third or fourth time, I am starting to "feel the difference", but at the beginning, I saw six extremely similar ugly pictures.

My explanation probably isn't very good, but visual impressions are difficult to describe verbally.