SilentCal comments on Raven paradox settled to my satisfaction - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Manfred 06 August 2014 02:46AM

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Comment author: SilentCal 06 August 2014 07:13:24PM 10 points [-]

If we were sampling random non-black objects and none of them were ravens, that really would be evidence that all ravens are black.

The reason it seems silly to take a yellow banana as evidence that all ravens are black is that 'sampling the space of nonblack things' is not an accurate description of what we're doing when we look at a banana. When we see a raven, we do implicitly think it's more or less randomly drawn from the (local) population of ravens.

If you had grown up super-goth and only ever seen black things, you would have no idea what things have nonblack versions. If you went outside one day and saw a bunch of nonblack things and none of them were ravens, you might indeed start to suspect that all ravens were black; the more nonblack things you saw, the stronger this suspicion would get.

Comment author: Manfred 07 August 2014 04:07:27AM 0 points [-]

I agree. In the first example, it's because if our probability distribution only encompasses two categories, any increase in one is a decrease in the other. In the second example, it's because the ex-super-goth's hypothesis space includes all sorts of relationships between number of black things and number of nonblack things - their preconceptions about the world are different, rather than you just stipulating that they sample non-black things.