Dagon comments on Circular belief updating - Less Wrong

6 Post author: irrational 11 December 2013 06:26AM

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Comment author: Dagon 11 December 2013 10:39:46PM 0 points [-]

I think your degree of belief in their rationality (and their trustworthiness in terms of not trying to mislead you, and their sanity in terms of having priors at least mildly compatible with yours) should have a very large effect on how much you update based on the evidence that they claim a belief.

The fact that they know of each other and still have wildly divergent beliefs indicates that they don't trust in each other's reasoning skills. Why would you give them much more weight than they gave each other?

Comment author: irrational 11 December 2013 11:55:32PM 0 points [-]

For this experiment, I don't want to get involved in the social aspect of this. Suppose they aren't aware of each other, or it's very impolite to talk about sorcerers, or whatever. I am curious about their individual minds, and about an outside observer that can observe both (i.e. me).