Larks comments on Bayesian Adjustment Does Not Defeat Existential Risk Charity - Less Wrong

43 Post author: steven0461 17 March 2013 08:50AM

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Comment author: Larks 15 March 2013 12:53:05PM 3 points [-]

Ok, but if that's your reference class, "isn't a donkey sanctuary" counts as evidence you can update on. It seems there's large classes of charities we can be confident will not be extraordinarily effective, and these don't include FHI, MIRI etc.

Comment author: steven0461 16 March 2013 01:32:46AM 0 points [-]

Yes. There's a choice as to what to put into the prior and what to put into the likelihood. This makes it more difficult to make claims like "this number is a reasonable prior and this one is not". Instead, one has to specify the population the prior is about, and this in turn affects what likelihood ratios are reasonable.