ciphergoth comments on Eutopia is Scary - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: datadataeverywhere 03 February 2011 12:22:30AM *  0 points [-]

a very large swathe of the poly community is of a new-age and/or neopagan bent

Ugh, agreed.

I think P(newage|poly) - P(newage) > P(rationalist|poly) - P(rationalist) > 0.

I also think P(poly|rationalist) - P(poly) >> P(rationalist|poly) - P(rationalist), which is why we see it as a Common Interest.

As an aside, I've been reading your blog since (I think) before you joined LessWrong; like Wei Dai, you're one of the connections I've made to a different community that has appeared here. I usually read it through RSS, which I think broke. You also appear to have abandoned your earlier blog posts?

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.