taelor comments on Einstein's Superpowers - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 May 2008 06:40AM

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Comment author: taelor 11 March 2013 02:49:11PM 3 points [-]

This reminds me of the time somebody asked me if I considered myself a genius and I asked them to define genius as a fraction of the population. "1 in 100,000? 1 in 1 million?" I inquired. And they said, "1 in 300" to which my reply was to just laugh.

I remember a time I saw a newsreport about a little girl who "miraculously" survived some terminal disease. Later in the report, it was mentioned that the recovery rate for said disease was something like 2%, and I laughed out loud that 1 in 50 was not a miracle.