= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nisan comments on Nonmindkilling open questions - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (112)
The future seems less definite than the present. I can imagine someone telling Yvain "Well, sure, we can assign a probability to whether there will be a major earthquake in California in the next ten years, because it hasn't happened yet. But a proposition about the present is either true or false; probabilities aren't appropriate for that." I've never heard anyone say that, but I think it's something people would say.
So why does that mean that it is good to have difficulty coming up with a good estimate of whether an existing statement is true? It seems like your hypothetical argument is obviously wrong from the Bayesian point-of-view, for example see this recent article. You sound like you don't support this hypothetical argument, so I still don't understand your original comment.
As I understand it, the purpose of Yvain's post is to come up with specific propositions that he can use to convince people that probabilities are appropriate for thinking about propositions in general. calef's comment above is a pedagogically useful proposition for this purpose because it satisfies most (if not all) of the criteria Yvain listed in his post. My comment to calef points out an additional point in its favor: The proposition is not about a future event, so it sidesteps a possible pedagogical failure mode that I described in the grandparent.
I think you misidentified what the word "this" refers to in my response to calef.
Aha! It suddenly makes sense. Thanks.