Annoyance comments on No One Knows Stuff - Less Wrong

7 Post author: talisman 12 May 2009 05:11AM

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Comment author: MichaelHoward 12 May 2009 12:59:08PM *  1 point [-]

'strong evidence is the sort of evidence we couldn't possibly find if the hypothesis were false'.

-blink-

If you mean this, please elaborate. If not, please change the wording before you confuse the living daylights out of some poor newcomer.

Edit: I'm not nitpicking him for infinite certainty. I acknowledge it's reasonable informally to tell me a ticket I'm thinking of buying couldn't possibly win the lottery. That's not what I mean. I mean even finding some overwhelmingly strong evidence doesn't necessarily mean the hypothesis is overwhelmingly likely to be true. If the comment's misleading then given it's subject it seems worth pointing out!

Example: Say you're randomly chosen to take a test with a false positive rate of 1% for a cancer that occurs in 0.1% of the population, and it returns positive. That's strong evidence for the hypothesis that you have that cancer, but the hypothesis is probably false.

Comment author: Annoyance 12 May 2009 01:21:04PM 1 point [-]

Strong evidence is evidence that, given certain premises, has no chance of arising.

Of course, Eliezer has also claimed that nothing can have no chance of arising (probability zero), so it's easy to see how one might be confused about his position.

Traditionally, evidence that has less than a particular value of arising given the truth of a hypothesis (usually 5%) is considered to be strong, but that's really an arbitrary decision.

Comment author: Cyan 12 May 2009 02:59:13PM *  0 points [-]

Traditionally, evidence that has less than a particular value of arising given the truth of a hypothesis (usually 5%) is considered to be strong, but that's really an arbitrary decision.

Correction: traditionally evidence against an hypothesis is considered strong if the chance of that evidence or any more extreme evidence arising given the truth of the hypothesis is less than an arbitrary value. (If this tradition doesn't make sense to you, you are not alone.)