Neel_Krishnaswami comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 October 2007 02:50AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (596)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Neel_Krishnaswami 30 October 2007 08:19:00PM 0 points [-]

Eliezer, in your response to g, are you suggesting that we should strive to ensure that our probability distribution over possible beliefs sum to 1? If so, I disagree: I don't think this can be considered a plausible requirement for rationality. When you have no information about the distribution, you ought to assign probabilities uniformly, according to Laplace's principle of indifference. But the principle of indifference only works for distributions over finite sets. So for infinite sets you have to make an arbitrary choice of distribution, which violates indifference.