Elund comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

88 Post author: Yvain 26 October 2014 06:05PM

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Comment author: Elund 27 October 2014 12:13:54AM *  0 points [-]

Putting 0 is misleading. It implies that you're confident there is no chance at all. If you're really not leaning one way or another, your best bet is to just put 50, or perhaps even skip the question if you really don't want to give a probability.

Comment author: Jiro 28 October 2014 01:55:46AM 1 point [-]

Choosing 50% is availability bias. Just because the question is presented as a choice between MWI and everything else doesn't mean there are only two choices. There are zillions of choices; MWI is just the one mentioned on the screen in front of me.

Comment author: Elund 28 October 2014 02:23:10AM *  0 points [-]

I assumed you'd already factored in those other choices and still weren't leaning more for or against it relative to all the other possibilities combined. By "leaning one way or another", I meant along a hypothetical axis of "strongly believe" or "strongly disbelieve" for the given proposition. You have a good point about availability bias though. You can self-correct for that to some extent by decreasing your assigned probabilities, and we'd have to take availability bias into account while interpreting the probabilities given by other people.