Michael_Howard comments on The Weighted Majority Algorithm - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 November 2008 11:19PM

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

Comments (94)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Michael_Howard 13 November 2008 12:58:42AM 0 points [-]

To put my point another way...

Say your experts, above, predict instance frequencies in populations. Huge populations, so you can only test expert accuracy by checking subsets of those populations.

So, you write an algorithm to choose which individuals to sample from populations when testing expert's beliefs. Aren't there situations where the best algorithm, the one least likely to bias for any particular expert algorithm, would contain some random element?

I fear randomness is occasionally necessary just to fairly check the accuracy of beliefs about the world and overcome bias.