gwern comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong

3 Post author: OrphanWilde 22 March 2013 05:24PM

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Comment author: gwern 23 March 2013 02:29:07AM 3 points [-]

If they're presenting false evidence and are otherwise indistinguishable from truth-tellers, then I would guess that agreement would fall a lot or cease to happen; if they're the equivalent of random noise, then I'm not sure what would happen, but probably bad stuff if we go by Hanson's paper on communicating rare evidence; and if they're merely being selective about evidence, you can still infer stuff from their reports (the Bullock thesis in my backfire effect page would be relevant here).

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 March 2013 02:12:33AM 1 point [-]

(This is obvious, but it took me a bit to explicitly notice: deceptive agents in the environment is exactly the same formally speaking as irrational agents in the notionally Bayesian community, so of course the agreement theorem doesn't apply.)