Kawoomba comments on What Bayesianism taught me - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Kawoomba 24 August 2013 09:00:50AM 1 point [-]

Practically, there is a fuzzy threshold beyond which I need to just ignore very weak evidence, unless there's so much of it that the sum total crosses the bounds of significance.

Consider the difficulties of programming something like that:

Ignore evidence. If the accumulated ignored evidence crosses some threshold, process the whole of it.

You see the problem. If the quoted sentence is your preferred modus operandi, you'll have to restrict what you mean by "ignore". You'll still need to file it somewhere, and to evaluate it somehow, just so when the cumulative weight exceeds your given threshold, you'll be able to still update on it.

Comment author: Baughn 24 August 2013 11:18:14PM 1 point [-]

Realistically, humans seem to ignore it (and forget about it) unless they get a lot all at once. Yes, that's a failure mode, but it's not usually a major problem.

Or, I suppose, if they want to believe it, but that's hardly the same thing.