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Unnamed comments on When None Dare Urge Restraint, pt. 2 - Less Wrong
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Not necessarily. If the awesome way of dying involves saving billions of people's lives, and living forever involves humanity going nearly extinct with all of the survivors (including yourself) being tortured for eternity...
Right, so think of this graph as actually being two graphs: one of the situation you describe, and one of the situation you do not describe. Then we blend these two graphs together according to the probability of each situation occurring in order to most accurately represent the future...
Then put error bars on them for sqrt(E(awesomeness^2|living forever) - E(awesomeness|living forever)^2) and sqrt(E(awesomeness^2|dying in an awesome way) - E(awesomeness|dying in an awesome way)^2). :-)
That seems to me like something you could contrive to say about any generally-true comparison...
Yes, which is why it's an awesome go to test to apply to generalizations. Death, extinction, torture forever, saving billions of people!
That test is only useful if you're interested in illustrating exceptions to the norm. The graph, I think, does a brilliant job of illustrating normalized expectations.
I would assume that for most generalizations, it either shouldn't be a generalization, or else it's meant to illustrate normalized expectations. So the test seems useless unless you simply need to demonstrate that, duh, generalizations tend to have exceptions.
'Generalizations' is an interesting word in as much as it expresses nearly the opposite meaning depending on the kind of person who speaks it (and to a lesser extent, the context).
Can you expand on what you actually mean by that? I've always taken a generalization to mean "a broad statement that is true for the majority (but not all) specific instances of the group". For instance, one can generalize that humans have 2 arms - this, despite there being a number of exceptions, and the average (mean) values being less than 2.