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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Seeking LWist Caricatures
I've written the existence of a cult-like "Bayesian Conspiracy" of mostly rebellious post-apocalypse teens - and now I'm looking for individuals to populate it with. What I /want/ to do is come up with as many ways that someone who's part of the LW/HPMOR/Sequences/Yudkowsky-ite/etc memeplex could go wrong, that tend not to happen to members of the regular skeptical community. Someone who's focused on a Basilisk, someone on Pascal's Mugging, someone focused on dividing up an infinity of timelines into unequal groups...
Put another way, I've been trying to think of the various ways that people outside the memeplex see those inside it as weirdos.
(My narrative goal: For my protagonist to experience trying to be a teacher. I'd be ecstatic if I could have at least one of the cultists be able to teach her a thing or two in return, but since I've based her knowledge of the memeplex on mine, that's kind of tricky to arrange.)
I can't guarantee that I'll end up spending more than a couple of sentences on any of this - but I figure that the more ideas I have to try building with, the more likely I will.
(Also asked on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2kopgx/qbst_seeking_lwist_caricatures/ .)
Calculating Bayes rule for everything can be quite weird for a lot of people. I remember a case where someone found it weird that another person asked on LW how to do a Bayesian calculation for the likelihood that a specific girl likes him.
Calculating probabilities for many everyday issues is hugely weird for many people. You might even have to take care to make it sound believable even if you do describe a real world character.
I remember an anecdote of a person doing an utility calculation that suggest having sex without a condom and being exposed to the chance of getting AIDS is quite okay.
Another of those things that CFAR preaches that can be seen as pretty weird is purposeful comfort zone extension. It's the kind of topic where you also have to worry about believability if you just tell real world stories.
And rightly so. The great majority of people are badly calibrated, can't estimate priors properly, etc. If they tried to calculate probabilities for "many everyday issues" I would bet most of them would land straight in the valley of bad rationality.
Heck, many people here can't do it right. I'm in particular thinking of the recent thread about computing probability of UFOs or aliens.