Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Outside the Laboratory - Less Wrong

63 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2007 03:46AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2007 09:22:36PM 1 point [-]

pdf, that gets into the issue of ignorance priors which is a whole bagful o' worms in its own right. I tend to believe that we should choose more fundamental and earlier elements of a causal model. The factory was probably built by someone who had in mind a box of a particular volume, and so that, in the real world, is probably the earliest element of the causal model we should be ignorant about. If the factory poofed into existence as a random collection of machinery that happened to manufacture cubic boxes, it would be appropriate to be ignorant about the side length.