Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Given that this quote essentially advises ignoring priors, I don't see what's so Bayesian about it.

Good point; I hadn't really thought about it that way! I had interpreted it as reminding you to update your probability estimates based on observed evidence.

4A1987dM12y

I took it to be about using posteriors rather than priors (i.e., P(X is trans | X is wondering whether they're trans) != P(X is trans)), but I know I steelman writers on the Internet too much.

8VAuroch12y

The other way of reading the quote is that it's emphasizing the huge complexity penalty which should be assessed on "I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself that I’m trans to the point that I’m having this kind of crisis" and nodding in the direction of the reversal test. And emphasizing that part of the argument makes it look pretty good.