Sewing-Machine comments on Reply to Holden on 'Tool AI' - Less Wrong

94 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 June 2012 06:00PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 July 2012 05:52:40PM 10 points [-]

And atheism is a religion, and bald is a hair color.

The three distinguishing characteristics of "reference class tennis" are (1) that there are many possible reference classes you could pick and everyone engaging in the tennis game has their own favorite which is different from everyone else's; (2) that the actual thing is obviously more dissimilar to all the cited previous elements of the so-called reference class than all those elements are similar to each other (if they even form a natural category at all rather than having being picked out retrospectively based on similarity of outcome to the preferred conclusion); and (3) that the citer of the reference class says it with a cognitive-traffic-signal quality which attempts to shut down any attempt to counterargue the analogy because "it always happens like that" or because we have so many alleged "examples" of the "same outcome" occurring (for Hansonian rationalists this is accompanied by a claim that what you are doing is the "outside view" (see point 2 and 1 for why it's not) and that it would be bad rationality to think about the "individual details").

I have also termed this Argument by Greek Analogy after Socrates's attempt to argue that, since the Sun appears the next day after setting, souls must be immortal.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 July 2012 10:40:08PM 1 point [-]

The three distinguishing characteristics of "reference class tennis" are

Do Karnofsky's contributions have even one of these characteristics, let alone all of them?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 July 2012 12:09:48AM 3 points [-]

Empirically obviously 1 is true, I would argue strongly for 2 but it's a legitimate point of dispute, and I would say that there were relatively small but still noticeable but quite forgiveable traces of 3.