ialdabaoth comments on Probability and radical uncertainty - Less Wrong

11 Post author: David_Chapman 23 November 2013 10:34PM

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Comment author: ialdabaoth 24 November 2013 04:53:02AM 4 points [-]

how would you know you hadn't left out important possibilities?

At least one of the top-level headings should be a catch-all "None of the above", which represents your estimated probability that you left something out.

Comment author: David_Chapman 24 November 2013 05:08:20AM 1 point [-]

That's good, yes!

How would you assign a probability to that?

Comment author: CoffeeStain 24 November 2013 05:55:05AM 3 points [-]

"How often do listing sorts of problems with some reasonable considerations result in an answer of 'None of the above' for me?"

If "reasonable considerations" are not available, then we can still:

"How often did listing sorts of problems with no other information available result in an answer of 'None of the above' for me?"

Even if we suppose that maybe this problem bears no resemblance to any previously encountered problem, we can still (because the fact that it bears no resemblance is itself a signifier):

"How often did problems I'd encountered for the first time have an answer I never thought of?"

Comment author: ialdabaoth 24 November 2013 05:33:08AM 3 points [-]

Ideally, by looking a the number of times that I've experienced out-of-context problems in the past. You can optimize further by creating models that predict the base amount of novelty in your current environment - if you have reason to believe that your current environment is more unusual / novel than normal, increase your assigned "none of the above" proportionally. (And conversely, whenever evidence triggers the creation of a new top-level heading, that top-level heading's probability should get sliced out of the "none of the above", but the fact that you had to create a top-level heading should be used as evidence that you're in a novel environment, thus slightly increasing ALL "none of the above" categories. If you're using hard-coded heuristics instead of actually computing probability tables, this might come out as a form of hypervigilance and/or curiosity triggered by novel stimulus.)

Comment author: philh 25 November 2013 02:27:42PM 0 points [-]

which represents your estimated probability that you left something out.

The probability assigned to "none of the above" should be smaller than your probability that you left something out, since "none of the above is true" is a strict subset of "I left out a possibility".

(It's possible I misinterpreted you, so apologies if I'm stating the obvious.)