Rationality Quotes April 2014

elharo

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.

And one new rule:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.

And one new rule:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

In this case they come from me.

In other words, you made them up. Fictional evidence.

Feel free to post your own numbers.

you did say (my emphasis)

Your belief should change by orders of magnitude.

Why should a myth about Zeus change anyone's belief by "orders of magnitude"?

In other words, you made them up.

I'm decently calibrated on the credence game and have made plenty of prediction book predictions. The idea of Bayesianism that it's good to boil down your beliefs to probability numbers.

you did say (my emphasis)

If you think my argument is wrong provide your own numbers. P(Zeus exists | Myths exists) and P(Zeus exists | Myths don't exist)

There really no point discussing Zeus further if you aren't willing to put number on your own beliefs. Apart from that I linked to a discussion about Bayesianism and you might want to read that discussion if you want a deeper understanding of the claim.

12Nornagest12y

I'd buy it. Consider all the possible gods about whom no myths exist: I wouldn't exactly call this line of argument rigorous, but it seems reasonable to say that there's much stronger evidence for the existence of Baduhenna, a Germanic battle-goddess known only from Tacitus' Annals, than for the existence of Gleep, a god of lint balls that collect under furniture whom I just made up. Of course, there's some pretty steep diminishing returns here. A second known myth might be good for a doubling of probability or so -- there are surprisingly many mythological figures that are very poorly known -- but a dozen known myths not much more than that.

5Anders_H12y

Because the probability of there being a myth about Zeus, given that Zeus exists, is orders of magnitude higher than the probability of there being a myth about Zeus, given that he does not exist?

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