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shminux comments on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 11 March 2014 10:45PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 March 2014 01:11:58AM *  4 points [-]

I'm curious what others thoughts are on Black Swan Theory/Knightian Uncertainty vs. pure Bayesian Reasoning. Do you think there are things in which bayesian prediction will tend to do more harm than good?

BrienneStrohl posted something on her facebook that said she thought the phrase "Knightian Uncertainity" had negative information value, and an interesting conversation ensued between Brienne, myself, Eliezer,Kevin Carlson, and a few others. It's of particular interest to me because Black Swan Theory is so central to how I view the world. If it turns out I've been assuming unpredictability when I should be trusting my predictions, I'll have to reevaluate some of the choices I've made.

Here's the original conversation for context, if you're interested: https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10152237491864598

Comment author: shminux 12 March 2014 02:34:27AM 1 point [-]

Scott Aaronson has a concrete example of Knightian uncertainly in his paper The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.