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Kingreaper comments on What Evidence Filtered Evidence? - Less Wrong
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Comments (38)
What's being overlooked is that your priors before hearing the clever arguer are not the same as your priors if there were no clever arguer.
Consider the case if the clever arguer presents his case and it is obviously inadequate. Perhaps he refers to none of the usual signs of containing a diamond and the signs he does present seem unusual and inconclusive. (Assume all the usual idealizations, ie no question that he knows the facts and presents them in the best light, his motives are known and absolute, he's not attempting reverse psychology, etc) Wouldn't it seem to you that here is evidence that box B does not contain the diamond as he says? But if no clever arguer were involved, it would be a 50/50 chance.
So the prior that you're updating for each point the clever arguer makes starts out low. It crosses 0.5 at the point where his argument is about as strong as you would expect given a 50/50 chance of A or B.
What lowers it when CA begins speaking? You are predictively compensating for the biased updating you expect to do when you hear a biased but correct argument. (Idealizations are assumed here too. If we let CA begin speaking and then immediately stop him, this shouldn't persuade anybody that the diamond is in box A on the grounds that they're left with the low prior they start with.)
The answer is less clear when CA is not assumed to be clever. When he presents a feeble argument, is it because he can have no good argument, or because he couldn't find it? Ref "What evidence bad arguments".
Any attempt to get information from the Clever Arguer relies on the Clever Arguer being less clever than you (or at least, not clever enough to know how clever you are)
A clever arguer might, perfectly happily, argue that Box A contains a diamond because it has turquoise elephants drawn on it, something with no relation to diamonds. He might argue that Box A contains the diamond because UFO sightings over the past ten years have been higher than the ten previous years.
He might do all these things, because he's been paid by the owner of Box B.
This is colloquially known as "trolling"
Are you allowing these Clever Arguers to freely lie as well as be clever in the way they argue? My understanding is that that it is possible to get information from a Clever Arguer when that information helps them with their argument. Consider the case where lying to a court would be punished as obstruction of justice but there is no law against speaking bullshit that messes with the mind of the jury.
They don't need to lie to troll.
You can get information I suppose, but the information is only in the form of facts about the box, not facts about the facts.
Simply because the clever arguer fails to successfully argue his case doesn't mean the diamond is more likely in the other box, because if it did the clever arguer could be a step ahead.
If you assume that a lack of evidence indicates that you should go for the other box, the Clever Arguer can choose to argue for the wrong box, and provide a very bad supply of evidence, thus misleading you while Not Technically Lying.
If the evidence provided by the clever arguer is sufficient, then it may be useful. But in that case the information is coming from the evidence, not the arguer (whose behaviour is too complicated to serve as meta-evidence)
tl;dr: I was wrong, you can get evidence from the clever arguer IFF the arguer has an overwhelming supply of evidence for his side or you are aware of which side he has been paid by. But you should never adjust your expected level DOWN based on his behaviour unless you have external evidence as to which side he is on.
Am I right in assuming that the above is your intended meaning? It seems to fit and if not I would have to reject the 'exclusive if' claim.
I also note that even if you don't know which side a clever arguer is on, if your probability is not at 0.5 then you will still need to update, regardless of what evidence the cleaver arguer has. Just by knowing that he is a clever arguer.
Indeed you are correct as regards your correction (am editing it now)
mental note, think through further before posting
On the second bit: I'm not sure if that's accurate. I've got intuitions arguing in both directions. I will have to think on it
oh, btw, how do you do those quote-lines?
Start a new line with a right angle bracket and a space, then the text you want to quote.
Ahh, welcome welcome to lesswrong! The syntax is based off .
>If you copy and pasted this sentence it would appear as a quote. (It doesn't for me because I put the angle bracket in a code span with back ticks:`>`)The general answer is that if you hit the Help button at the lower left corner of the reply box, you get some formatting information.
IIRC, the help window is a subset of a system called Markup, but I can't find a link for it.
Markdown.
Lower right corner.
(Well, on my system, at least. "There is at least one user interface element on a Web app that is black on at least one side.")
Sorry-- a slip of the mind on my part-- it's lower right for me, too.