laofmoonster comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Coscott 25 February 2014 04:57AM

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Comment author: laofmoonster 02 March 2014 04:23:38PM *  1 point [-]

Somebody outside of LW asked how to quantify prior knowledge about a thing. When googling I came across a mathematical definition of surprise, as "the distance between the posterior and prior distributions of beliefs over models". So, high prior knowledge would lead to low expected surprise upon seeing new data. I didn't see this formalization used on LW or the wiki, perhaps it is of interest.

Speaking of the LW wiki, how fundamental is it to LW compared to the sequences, discussion threads, Main articles, hpmor, etc?

Comment author: gwern 02 March 2014 04:44:06PM 2 points [-]

I didn't see this formalization used on LW or the wiki, perhaps it is of interest.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=100&q=Kullback-Leibler%20OR%20surprisal%20site%3Alesswrong.com

Speaking of the LW wiki, how fundamental is it to LW compared to the sequences, discussion threads, Main articles, hpmor, etc?

Not very, unfortunately.