ChristianKl comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: eggman 19 February 2014 12:57PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 19 February 2014 06:56:59PM 2 points [-]

He eventually finds the true solution, which perfectly explains all the evidence, and usually involves a complicated plot by someone else committing the crime in such a way to get an airtight alibi, or to frame the first suspect, or both.

Reality doesn't work that way. In reality most solutions don't explain every clues that you find. A lot of clues are just random noise.

Comment author: Alejandro1 19 February 2014 07:03:24PM 2 points [-]

Yes, that was part of my point too. Maximizing P(E|H) at the expense of P(H) is much less likely (in real life) to give you a true solution than maximizing P(H|E) with Bayes, even if some components of P(E|H) are not particularly high (which is normal in real life).