Peter_de_Blanc comments on Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 December 2007 10:14PM

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Comment author: Peter_de_Blanc 14 December 2007 12:22:34AM 5 points [-]

If not, why not? I gave you plenty of evidence.

Caledonian, you gave evidence, but you certainly didn't give plenty of it. I see you ignored the part of my post where I talked about how to quantify evidence. The important question isn't whether or not we have evidence; it's how much evidence we have.

Let me make an analogy. I can define sugar as sucrose; a specific carbohydrate whose molecular structure you can view on wikipedia. I might say that a substance is "sugary" if it contains some sugar. But by this definition, almost everything is sugary, so I hasten to point out that the important question is _how_ sugary it is, and we might define this as the fraction of its mass which consists of sugar.

If, after I have pointed this out, you offer me some sugar cookies containing 1 molecule of sucrose, and then defend yourself by saying that according to my definition, they are indeed sugary, you are being obnoxious. I already told you how to quantify sugariness, and you ignored it for rhetorical reasons.