witzvo comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: witzvo 30 May 2012 01:29:37AM 0 points [-]

Well, I was raised on it. If one day your Mom says, "don't touch the stove, it'll hurt", and voila she's right, you start to think maybe you ought to pay attention to what they're telling you some times, including when they talk about "God." Theres no way to distinguish one form of advice from the other until you get more experience. On this basis many things are acquired by making inferences based on the actions of people around us as we are growing up. "Everyone is wearing pants. Hmm. I guess I should too" is a pretty good heuristic Bayesian argument for many things, and keeps us out of trouble in unfamiliar experiences more often than not [cite some darwin page on here].

If I hadn't been raised that way, probably nothing would have promoted it to my attention.

Comment author: Desrtopa 30 May 2012 01:44:12AM 1 point [-]

Knowing more about the processes that actually gave rise to your parents' pronouncements on religion, do you think you were right to assign as much weight of evidence to them as you originally did?

Comment author: witzvo 30 May 2012 05:55:04AM 2 points [-]

Ah. Well, you've got me there. I'll think about it. Your comment makes me think, though, about a more general issue. Is there a name for a bias that can happen if you think about an issue multiple times and get more and more convinced by, what actually, is essentially only one piece of evidence?

Comment author: Desrtopa 30 May 2012 05:58:11AM 2 points [-]

Well, there are various ways to double-count evidence, but that sounds a lot like the idea discussed in this post.

Comment author: witzvo 31 May 2012 08:11:28AM 1 point [-]

Thanks.