lukeprog comments on Strategic research on AI risk - Less Wrong

7 Post author: lukeprog 06 June 2012 05:02PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 06 June 2012 06:27:51PM *  1 point [-]

Is there any way that a policy maker could have known in advance to pay attention to Rasmussen rather than other experts?

Yes. Rasmussen used Bayes, while everyone else used the methods of (1) Frequentism or (2) Experts Must Have Great Intuitions.

Comment author: JGWeissman 06 June 2012 07:09:08PM 14 points [-]

All else being equal, I would put more trust in the report that uses Bayesian statistics than a report that uses Frequentist statistics, but I wouldn't expect that strong an effect from that alone. (I would expect a strong increase in accuracy for using any kind of statistics over intuition.)

Following your link, I notice that Rasmussen's report used a fault tree. I would expect that the consideration of failure modes of each component of a nuclear reactor played a huge role in his accuracy, and that Bayesian and Frequentist statistics would largely agree how to get individual failure rates from historical data and how to synthesize this information into a failure rate for the whole reactor. Assuming the other experts did not also use fault trees, I would credit the fault trees more than Bayes for Rasmussen's success. (And if they did, I would wonder where they went wrong.)

Comment author: shminux 06 June 2012 07:09:57PM 2 points [-]

This is not a convincing argument to a policy maker.

Comment author: lukeprog 06 June 2012 07:13:47PM 6 points [-]

Definitely not!