Dmytry comments on On accepting an argument if you have limited computational power. - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Dmytry 11 January 2012 05:07PM

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Comment author: Dmytry 11 January 2012 09:59:09PM *  1 point [-]

Well, the thought experiments are precisely the experiments in what's intuitive; that's why they are thought experiments rather than real experiments. It indeed is fairly useless to argue how one or two electrons behave, you have to take a look in the real world and see.

Likewise with the trolley problems; the implicit presumption is that they are not completely irrelevant to the real world, yet they are because they neglect the false positive rate (assuming it to be 0) while discussing an extremely low probability event (whose probability is well below any plausible false positive rate). This sort of thing is precisely why Bayesian reasoning is so important.