SilasBarta comments on Your Strength as a Rationalist - Less Wrong

69 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 August 2007 12:21AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 09 August 2010 11:16:14PM *  3 points [-]

I would if I were talking to a Bayesian, interpret it as meaning something where a "B is evidence for A" if rough calculation shows that P(A|B) > P(A). I don't generally expect rationalists to even mention individual data points unless P(A|B)/P(A) is large, but if someone else gave the data as an example, then I wouldn't expect it to be necessarily large if a Bayesian referred to as evidence. So for example, I could see a Bayesian asserting that the writing of the Bible is evidence for a global flood some 5000 years ago, but I'd be deeply surprised if a Bayesian brought this up in almost any context because the evidence is so weak (in this case P(A|B)>P(A) but P(A|B)/P(A) is very close to 1).

Comment author: SilasBarta 10 August 2010 08:56:56PM 2 points [-]

I agree, this sounds exactly right to me. Unfortunately, I remember that in a lot of Robin Hanson's earlier OvercomingBias posts, my reaction to them would be, "Yes, B is technically evidence in favor of A, but it's extremely weak -- why even mention it?" For example, Suicide Rock.

(I think I have a picture of one of those somewhere...)