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

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

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Comment author: FAWS 10 October 2012 10:56:54AM 1 point [-]

I disagree with this. The reason you shouldn't assign 50% to the proposition "I will win the lottery" is because you have some understanding of the odds behind the lottery. If a yes/no question which I have no idea about is asked, I am 50% confident that the answer is yes. The reason for this is point 2: provided I think a question and its negation are equally likely to have been asked, there is a 50% chance that the answer to the question you have asked is yes.

That's only reasonable if some agent is trying to maximize the information content of your answer. The vast majority of possible statements of a given length are false.

Comment author: TraderJoe 10 October 2012 05:54:10PM 2 points [-]

Sure, but how often do you see each of the following sentences in some kind of logic discussion: 2+2=3 2+2=4 2+2=5 2+2=6 2+2=7

I have seen the first and third from time to time, the second more frequently than any other, and virtually never see 2+2 = n for n > 5. Not all statements are shown with equal frequency. My guess is that the percentage of the time when "2+2 = x" is written in contexts where the statement is for a true/false logic proposition rather than an equation x = 4 is more common than all other values put together.

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