Polymeron comments on Beautiful Probability - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 January 2008 07:19AM

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

Comments (109)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Polymeron 13 April 2011 01:39:03PM 10 points [-]

Eliezer, I accept your point about the underlying laws of probability. However, your example is extremely flawed.

Of course what the researcher operates by should affect our interpretation of the evidence; it is, in itself, another piece of evidence! Specifically in this case, publishing your research only when you reach a certain conclusion implies that any similar researches that did not reach this threshold did not get published, and are thus not available to our evidence pool. This is filtered evidence.

So without knowing how many similar researches were conducted, the conclusion from the one research that did get published can't be seen as very strong. Do I need to draw the Bayesian analysis that shows why?