ciphergoth comments on Eutopia is Scary - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 January 2009 05:28AM

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

Comments (121)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ciphergoth 03 February 2011 01:32:09PM 2 points [-]

I think P(X|E) - P(X) is the wrong measure - should be the log likelihood ratio log(P(E|X)) - log(P(E|NOT X))

Comment author: datadataeverywhere 03 February 2011 02:36:56PM 1 point [-]

I was feeling uncomfortable about that myself.

In all likelihood, I shouldn't be using probability at all, because probability theory doesn't capture cause and effect well. Thinking back, what I should have said is just that rationalists are more likely to adopt polyamory than polyamorists are likely to adopt rationalism. The actual ratios of each are less relevant.

Comment author: ciphergoth 06 February 2011 11:26:34PM 0 points [-]

To be clear, this is almost the same as the formula you gave; I'm just using the log odds ratios formulation of Bayes theorem

LOR(X|E) = LOR(X) + log(P(E|X)) - log(P(E|NOT X))

where LOR(X) = log(P(X)/P(¬X))

in other words LOR(X|E) - LOR(X) = log(P(E|X)) - log(P(E|NOT X)) the log-likelihood ratio, the weight of evidence you need to update from one to the other.