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Kaj_Sotala comments on Rationality Quotes January 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Mestroyer 04 January 2014 07:39PM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 January 2014 08:03:06PM 46 points [-]

My 5 year old came to the dinner table, and calmly announced, "There is no Santa." I was puzzled because just couple of days ago he had taken his Christmas gift from Santa (though now that I think about it, he was not totally thrilled). So I asked why he thought so. He said, "Well, for Christmas I only got the gifts I told you about; I had gone to bed and told Santa himself what I wanted without telling you to see if he is real, and none of those came through - and I was a good boy all year!"

To be sure, I asked him, "But you saw Santa at the mall?" He laughed as hard as could be, then pointed out to me, "They are people in costumes!"

-- Wen Gong

Comment author: Zubon 07 January 2014 12:55:52AM 9 points [-]

A 5-year-old independently devised hypothesis testing. There is hope for this species.

Now we just need to teach him about estimating the probability that Santa looked at the full range of requests and decided to fulfill a subset that had only been told to the parents.

Comment author: Stabilizer 15 January 2014 06:51:29PM 0 points [-]

I don't think it is correct to say that the child came up with hypothesis testing independently.

From Wen Gong's profile, she's a software engineer. So clearly, the child has one parent who regularly would language such as: "well, if X was the case, then Y should have happened. But Y didn't. So X is very unlikely" (aka debugging) and so on. I'm also sure that the child had access to good books, education, TV, the Internet, other smart kids and adults.

So there may be hope for humanity, if all of humanity had access to all of the above.

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