alex_zag_al comments on When (Not) To Use Probabilities - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 July 2008 10:58AM

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Comment author: alex_zag_al 01 May 2016 01:45:41AM 0 points [-]

The alternative I would propose, in this particular case, is to debate the general rule of banning physics experiments because you cannot be absolutely certain of the arguments that say they are safe.

Giving up on debating the probability of a particular proposition, and shifting to debating the merits of a particular rule, is I feel one of the ideas behind frequentist statistics. Like, I'm not going to say anything about whether the true mean is in my confidence interval in this particular case. But note that using this confidence interval formula works pretty well on average.