FAWS comments on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Morendil 09 October 2012 03:49PM

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Comment author: FAWS 10 October 2012 12:45:19PM *  -1 points [-]

That's surely an artifice of human languages and even so it would depend on whether the statement is mostly structured using "or" or using "and".

It's true of any language optimized for conveying information. The information content of a statement is reciprocal to it's prior probability, and therefore more or less proportional to how many other statements of the same form would be false.

In your counter example the information content of a statement in the basic form decreases with length.