army1987 comments on Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 February 2008 09:20PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2011 08:26:41PM 2 points [-]

The statement “x approximately equals 98” and the statement “x approximately equals 100” will likely be interpreted in different ways. I'd normally interpret the former to mean that x is likely between 97.5 and 98.5, and unlikely to be less than 96 or more than 100; whereas I'd usually interpret the latter more broadly (e.g. between 90 and 110). In particular, if the latter was rephrased to “x approximately equals 10^2”, I wouldn't object to it being used to mean something as vague as “x is very likely to be somewhere between 30 and 300”.