Unknown comments on Conservation of Expected Evidence - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Unknown 06 February 2008 07:43:53PM 1 point [-]

This post was one of the most helpful for me personally, but I recently realized this isn't true in an absolute sense: "There is no possible plan you can devise, no clever strategy, no cunning device, by which you can legitimately expect your confidence in a fixed proposition to be higher (on average) than before."

Suppose the statement "I perform action A" is more probable given position P than given not-P. Then if I start planning to perform action A, this will be evidence that I will perform A. Therefore it will also be evidence for position P. So there is some plan that I can devise such that I can expect my confidence in P to be higher than before I devised the plan.

In general, of course, unless P is a position relating to my actions or habits, this effect will not be very large.