simplicio comments on Rationality Quotes May 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 03 May 2013 08:02PM

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Comment author: simplicio 05 May 2013 10:10:34PM 7 points [-]

Arguable example: probability and uncertainty. (More or less identical in my theorizing, but some call the idea of their identity the ludic fallacy.)

Comment author: roystgnr 06 May 2013 02:59:27PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 24 May 2013 07:50:38PM 1 point [-]

Oh, I read Taleb as using 'ludic fallacy' to mean using distributions with light tails.