You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

atucker comments on Tweetable Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: Alexandros 12 March 2011 08:00PM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (55)

Comments (55)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: atucker 13 March 2011 03:28:01AM 1 point [-]

Where there's a smoke there's a fire. Where there's evidence there's a fact.

Comment author: Dorikka 13 March 2011 06:30:59AM 2 points [-]

If one isn't already well versed in rationality, I can see this quote as encouraging people to make overconfident predictions on the basis of insufficient evidence.

Comment author: atucker 13 March 2011 02:21:32PM 1 point [-]

Fair enough. How about

Where there's smoke there's a fire, but steam and mist both look like smoke.

Comment author: Dorikka 13 March 2011 10:29:30PM 0 points [-]

Better, but I think that we're still losing too much information in it for this to be useful.

Comment author: atucker 13 March 2011 10:37:30PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I'd be fine if this one just died now. I found it somewhere else then tried to tack some rationality to the end of it, with no particular success.

Comment author: anonym 13 March 2011 07:00:11PM 0 points [-]

This doesn't make sense to me. The presence or absence of evidence does not determine whether a fact exists or not. Evidence refers to the basis for a belief. There can be evidence for non-facts (e.g., opinions), as well as no evidence for facts (e.g., whether the nth heaviest dinosaur that ever existed was doing something that we expect there to be a 50% chance of it doing when it was exactly 1 year old).

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit