Mitchell_Porter comments on Less Wrong Polls in Comments - Less Wrong

79 Post author: jimrandomh 19 September 2012 04:19PM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 20 September 2012 01:42:25AM 1 point [-]

Doesn't accept "⌊∞⌋".

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 01:51:42AM 3 points [-]

As well it shouldn't?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 11:04:17AM *  1 point [-]

Should it (or at least, should it accept inf and/or NaN)?

Submitting...

Comment author: Kindly 20 September 2012 12:40:29PM 1 point [-]

Well, use of those would make the mean meaningless.

It wouldn't be a problem if the polls had upper and lower bounds, because then you could exclude them (but you could also make the upper bound infinite if you wanted to). I don't think there's a need for them, though.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 01:12:58PM 3 points [-]

You don't need to use infinities to make the mean meaningless: giving answers such as 1e100 will suffice. On the other hand, NANs are traditionally just disregarded when computing means (i.e., the mean of 1, 2, 3 and NAN is taken to be 2) -- essentially they would amount to a blank vote.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 September 2012 12:26:47PM 0 points [-]

MP did not want it to accept either of those things; the notation used suggests "the largest integer less than or equal to infinity", which doesn't exist.