ArisKatsaris comments on Rationality Quotes May 2013 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (387)
-- aristosophy
This is often a good idea in mathematics. Two concepts that are equivalent in some context may no longer be equivalent once you move to a more general context; for example, familiar equivalent definitions are often no longer equivalent if you start dropping axioms from set theory or logic (e.g. the axiom of choice or excluded middle).
Outside of mathematical logic, some familiar examples include:
Arguable example: probability and uncertainty. (More or less identical in my theorizing, but some call the idea of their identity the ludic fallacy.)
There's still a couple related fallacies that Bayesians can commit.
Most related to the "ludic fallacy" as you've described it: if you treat both epistemic (lack of knowledge) and aleatory (lack of predetermination) uncertainty with the same general probability distribution function framework, it becomes tempting to try to collapse the two together. But a PDF-over-PDFs-over-outcomes still isn't the same thing as a PDF-over-outcomes, and if you try to compute with the latter you won't get the right results.
Most related to the "ludic fallacy" as I inferred it from Taleb: if you perform your calculations by assigning zero priors to various models, as everybody does to make the calculations tractable, then if evidence actually points towards one of those neglected priors and you don't recompute with it in mind, you'll find that your posterior estimates can be grossly mistaken.
Oh, I read Taleb as using 'ludic fallacy' to mean using distributions with light tails.
However, equivalences are also the bread and butter of inference. Distinguishing more than you need to will slow you down.
Unfortunately I only have a finite amount of storage available, so I can only do that up to a certain point.