Kawoomba comments on What Bayesianism taught me - Less Wrong

62 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 12 August 2013 06:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (201)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 12 August 2013 05:01:49PM *  1 point [-]

Well, we could use the word "evidence" in different ways (you requiring some magnitude-of-prior-shift).

There's a handy table, two of them in fact, of terminology for strength of evidence here. Up to 5 decibans is "barely worth mentioning". How many microbans does "Zeus ate my homework" amount to?

Think of what you're advocating here: whatever would we do if we disallowed strictly-speaking-correct-nitpicks on LW?

You may be joking, but I do think LW (and everywhere else) would be improved if people didn't do that. I find nitpicking as unappealing as nose-picking.

Comment author: Kawoomba 12 August 2013 08:09:03PM 2 points [-]

How many microbans does "Zeus ate my homework" amount to?

Few enough that it's in the "barely worth mentioning" bracket, of course. (Under any kind of resource constraint, it wouldn't be mentioned at all, however that only relates to its infinitesimal weight, not the nature of what it is (evidence).)

You say that shouldn't be classified as evidence, I say it should. Note that the table is about strength of evidence.