Kurros comments on Epistemic and Instrumental Tradeoffs - Less Wrong

20 Post author: katydee 19 May 2013 07:49AM

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Comment author: Kurros 22 May 2013 01:37:53AM 0 points [-]

If you are introduced to 5 blue-haired Xians but no black-haired Xians, you might infer that all or most Xians have blue hair. That is a pretty obvious case of sampling bias.

If a-priori you had no reason to expect that the population was dominantly blue-haired then you should begin to suspect some alternative hypothesis, like your sampling is biased for some reason, rather than believe everyone is blue haired.