Michael_Sullivan comments on Absurdity Heuristic, Absurdity Bias - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 September 2007 03:20AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (9)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Michael_Sullivan 07 October 2011 02:38:16AM 1 point [-]

Bringing myself back to what I was thinking in 2007 -- I think we have some semantic confusion around two different sense of absurdity. One is the heuristic Eliezer discusses -- the determination of whether a claim/prediction has surface plausibility. If not we file it under "absurd". An absurdity heuristic would be some heuristic which considers surface plausibility or lack thereof as evidence for or against a claim.

On the other hand, we have the sense of "Absurd!" as a very strong negative claim about something's probability of truth. So "Absurd!" stands in for "less than .01/.001/whatever", instead of a term such as "unlikely" which might mean "less than .15"

I was talking only about the first sense. It seemed to me that Eliezer was making a very strong claim that the absurdity heuristic (in the first sense) does no better than maximum entropy. That's equivalent to saying that surface plausibility or lack thereof amounts to zero evidence. That allowing yourself to modify probabilities downward due to "absurdity" even a small amount would be an error.

I strongly doubt that this is the case.

I agree completely that a claim of "Absurd!" in the second sense about a long-dated future prediction cannot ever be justified merely by absurdity in the first sense.