JonathanLivengood comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

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Comment author: JonathanLivengood 06 May 2013 04:49:04AM 4 points [-]

If the AI actually ends up with strong evidence for a scenario it assigned super-exponential improbability, the AI reconsiders its priors and the apparent strength of evidence rather than executing a blind Bayesian update, though this part is formally a tad underspecified.

I would love to have a conversation about this. Is the "tad" here hyperbole or do you actually have something mostly worked out that you just don't want to post? On a first reading (and admittedly without much serious thought -- it's been a long day), it seems to me that this is where the real heavy lifting has to be done. I'm always worried that I'm missing something, but I don't see how to evaluate the proposal without knowing how the super-updates are carried out.

Really interesting, though.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 May 2013 06:08:11AM 1 point [-]

That hyperbole one. I wasn't intending the primary focus of this post to be on the notion of a super-update - I'm not sure if that part needs to make it into AIs, though it seems to me to be partially responsible for my humanlike foibles in the Horrible LHC Inconsistency. I agree that this notion is actually very underspecified but so is almost all of bounded logical uncertainty.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 06 May 2013 08:00:15AM 1 point [-]

That hyperbole one.
...
I agree that this notion is actually very underspecified

Using "a tad" to mean "very" is understatement, not hyperbole.

Comment author: ygert 06 May 2013 11:36:09AM *  9 points [-]

Using "a tad" to mean "very" is understatement, not hyperbole.

One could call it hypobole.

Comment author: ciphergoth 06 May 2013 11:28:33AM 4 points [-]

Specifically, litotes.