jslocum comments on Conservation of Expected Evidence - Less Wrong

68 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 August 2007 03:55PM

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Comment author: Academian 20 March 2010 03:18:23AM *  6 points [-]

Fantastic heuristic! It's like x=y·(z/y)+(1-y)·(x-z)/(1-y) for the rationalist's soul :)

It's worth noting, though, that you can rationally expect your credence in a certain belief "to increase", in the following sense: If I roll a die, and I'm about to show you the result, your credence that it didn't land 6 is now 5/6, and you're 5/6 sure that this credence it about to increase to 1.

I think this is what makes people feel like they can have a non-trivial expected value for their new beliefs: you can expect an increase or expect a decrease, but quantitatively the two possibilities exactly cancel each out in the expected value of your belief.