= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kingreaper comments on Human inability to assign numerical probabilities - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (15)
I find the idea of having a range of probabilities sensible.
If you give a single probability, all you tell someone is your expectation of what will happen.
If you give a probability range you're transmitting both your probability AND your certainty that your probabiliy is correct; IOW (In Other Words) you are telling the listener how much evidence you believe yourself to have.
So, as you gain more evidence your probability range will narrow.
To clarify:
When you find a probability through bayes-fu, you need a prior. Precisely one prior. Which is going to be pretty arbitrary.
But what if you picked two symmetrical priors, and applied the evidence to those? You start with prior 1: 99.99% Prior 2: 0.01%
When you have a reasonable amount of evidence you'll find that prior 1 and prior 2 result in similar values (ie. prior 1 might give 40% while prior 2 gives 25%) If you were to get more evidence, the difference would gradually vanish, and the smaller the probability range the more firm your probability is.