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khafra comments on Draft: Reasons to Use Informal Probabilities - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: jimrandomh 11 October 2010 10:50PM

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Comment author: khafra 13 October 2010 08:01:21PM *  0 points [-]

I'd say "an order of magnitude is a rough estimate" is a rough estimate. Remember, this is epistemic probability, so whether you

  • just think 76297 looks prime-ish and guess 9/10

  • mentally estimate the natural logarithm, quickly check whether 76297 is divisible by 2 or 3, and call it a 1/2 chance

  • can actually compute the Sieve of Eratosthenes with five nines of accuracy for it in ten seconds and call it a 1/10000 chance

You're correct, as long as you're not mis-reading your own degree of belief. To get into confidence about your degree of belief, I think we'd have to get into something like informal Dempster-Schafer theory--which, incidentally, I'd love to do.