Vaniver comments on An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction - Less Wrong

53 Post author: Alex_Altair 11 July 2012 08:05AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 15 July 2012 06:00:17PM 6 points [-]

Lo, your hay fever subsides... and now you are stuck trying to recalculate your estimate of homeopathy being more than a sham in the face of the shear impossibility of the sugar pills with not a single active molecule remaining after multiple dilutions having any more effect than a regular sugar pill.

What would you do?

Test regular sugar pills, obviously. Apparently my hayfever responds to placebo, and that's awesome. High fives all around!

Comment author: shminux 15 July 2012 08:45:41PM 1 point [-]

Apparently my hayfever responds to placebo

and if it does not?

Comment author: Vaniver 16 July 2012 12:31:05AM 2 points [-]

Increase the probability that homeopathy works for me- but also increase the probability of all other competing hypotheses except the "sugar placebo" one. The next most plausible hypothesis at that point is probably that the effort is related to my mother's recommendation. Unless I expect the knowledge gained here to extend to something else, at some point I'll probably stop trying to explain it.

At some point, though, this hypothetical veers into "I wouldn't explain X because X wouldn't happen" territory. Hypothetical results don't have to be generated in the same fashion as real results, and so may have unreal explanations.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 16 July 2012 10:29:12AM 1 point [-]

Oooh! That would be so interesting. You could do blind trials with sugar pills vs other sugar pills. You could try to make other tests which could distinguish between homeopathic sugar and non-homeopathic sugar. Then if you found some you could try to make better placebos that pass the tests. You might end up finding an ingredient in the dye in the packaging that cures your hayfever. And if not something like that, you might end up rooting out something deep!

I suspect that if you were modelling an ideal mind rather than my rubbish one, the actual priors might not shift very much, but the expected value of investigating might be enough to prompt some experimenting. Especially if the ideal mind's hayfever was bad and the homeopathic sugar was expensive.