royf comments on Argument Screens Off Authority - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 December 2007 12:05AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (80)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: royf 23 August 2012 05:16:25AM 1 point [-]

p(H|E1,E2) [...] is simply not something you can calculate in probability theory from the information given [i.e. p(H|E1) and p(H|E2)].

Jaynes would disapprove.

You continue to give more information, namely that p(H|E1,E2) = p(H|E1). Thanks, that reduces our uncertainty about p(H|E1,E2).

But we are hardly helpless without it. Whatever happened to the Maximum Entropy Principle? Incidentally, the maximum entropy distribution (given the initial information) does have E1 and E2 independent. If your intuition says this before having more information, it is good.

Don't say that an answer can't be reached without further information. Say: here's more information to make your answer better.