Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes November 2014 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: elharo 07 November 2014 07:07PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 04 December 2014 09:14:17PM 1 point [-]

I'm envisioning observing that nothing even very bad has happened yet, which I think is in fact pretty well correlated with actual safety.

The classic counter-example involves a turkey in the middle of November. Nothing very bad has happened to it ever -- must be very safe, then...

Comment author: gjm 04 December 2014 10:04:10PM 0 points [-]

Sure. As with everything else in the universe, we have to make do with partial information and sometimes it'll lead us astray.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 December 2014 10:24:14PM 1 point [-]

There is a bit more wisdom here :-)

There usual context for this example is a conversation about relying on historical data and not paying too much attention to "external" (or "meta" or "structural" or... etc.) factors.