gwern comments on MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare - Less Wrong

83 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2013 01:16PM

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Comment author: gwern 08 March 2013 04:58:47AM 11 points [-]

At a first glance, I'm not sure humans can update by prespecified amounts, much less prespecified amounts of the right quantity in this case: something like >95% of all startups fail for various reasons, so even if LW-think could double the standard odds (let's not dicker around with merely increasing effectiveness by 50% or something, let's go all the way to +100%!), you're trying to see the difference between... a 5% success rate and a 10% success rate. One observation just isn't going to count for much here.