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Lumifer comments on Crush Your Uncertainty - Less Wrong Discussion

16 [deleted] 03 October 2013 05:48AM

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Tags: epistemology bayes

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Comment author: Lumifer 02 October 2013 06:08:52PM 1 point [-]

You should not be satisfied until exactly one hypothesis has non-negligible probability.

That's not a realistic goal for most non-trivial real-life situations.

I have a nasty suspicion that trying to "crush the uncertainty" will lead to overconfidence bias. Mentioning Nassim Taleb's black swans is also relevant here.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 October 2013 07:50:13PM 0 points [-]

That's not a realistic goal for most non-trivial real-life situations.

Here we run into the difference between threshold goals and directional goals. The above was a directional goal.

I have a nasty suspicion that trying to "crush the uncertainty" will lead to overconfidence bias.

Hence the very small lip service paid with "unjustified overconfidence is even less cool". Of course that could use some expansion.. Maybe in a different post.

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