DanielLC comments on two puzzles on rationality of defeat - Less Wrong

4 Post author: fsopho 12 December 2011 02:17PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 13 December 2011 01:59:31AM 1 point [-]

You can't just ignore evidence on the basis that it's probably misleading. If you want to find out the probability that T is true, you take all of the evidence into account. If you want to know if a particular piece of evidence is misleading, you take all of the evidence into account to find the probability that what it's evidence of is false, and that's the probability of it being misleading.

I can see how it might appear that if a piece of evidence has a 70% chance of being misleading, for example, you should only do 30% of an update. That's not how it works. If it has a 70% chance of being misleading, that means that whatever it's evidence for has a 30% chance of being true. If you find further evidence for it, then it increases the probability that it's true, and decreases the probability that the original evidence is misleading.