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.

Will_Sawin comments on Bayes Slays Goodman's Grue - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: potato 17 November 2011 10:45AM

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

Comments (120)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 16 November 2011 11:39:38PM 2 points [-]

One would suspect that the emerald-producing locations in our universe do not behave quite as cleanly as mathematically as you describe them. Instead, fuzziness and messiness creep in. Maybe such sites degrade over time, causing the emeralds to be slightly bluer. Maybe not.

Broad principles like "green earlier implies green now" are approximations that allow us to simplify the complexity of actual, extremely difficult Bayesian inference.