SoullessAutomaton comments on The Trouble With "Good" - Less Wrong

83 Post author: Yvain 17 April 2009 02:07AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2009 05:06:47AM 2 points [-]

I don't think that's possible, unless the first incident makes it conditionally less likely that the second incident will occur unless Hitler is ungood.

Unless you mean, "the total information that a sum of one incident has occurred is less than a hundredth the evidence than the total information that a sum of a hundred incidents have occurred", in which case I agree, because in the former case you're also getting the information on all the people who didn't commit violent acts.

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 18 April 2009 10:01:07AM 1 point [-]

Assuming the prior probability of politically-motivated violent incidents to be greater than zero, X incidents where X/(number of supporters) is roughly equal to the incidence for the entire population offers very little evidence of anything, so X*100 is trivially more than a hundred times the evidence.