Vaniver comments on Open thread, Dec. 21 - Dec. 27, 2015 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: MrMind 21 December 2015 07:56AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 22 December 2015 06:13:12PM 0 points [-]

But that requires considering the three hypotheses as a group rather than in isolation from all other hypotheses to calculate 0.33.

Not really. A hypothesis's prior probability comes from the total of all of your knowledge; in order to determine that P(HA)=0.33 Lumifer needed the additional facts that there were three possibilities that were all equally likely.

It works just as well if I say that my prior is P(HA)=0.5, without any exhaustive enumeration of the other possibilities. Then evidence E confirms HA if P(HA|E)>P(HA).

(One should be suspicious that my prior probability assessment is a good one if I haven't accounted for all the probability mass, but the mechanisms still work.)

Comment author: FrameBenignly 22 December 2015 06:46:06PM 0 points [-]

One should be suspicious that my prior probability assessment is a good one if I haven't accounted for all the probability mass, but the mechanisms still work.

Which is one of the other problems I was getting at