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.

SilentCal comments on Raven paradox settled to my satisfaction - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Manfred 06 August 2014 02:46AM

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

Comments (24)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: SilentCal 06 August 2014 07:13:24PM 10 points [-]

If we were sampling random non-black objects and none of them were ravens, that really would be evidence that all ravens are black.

The reason it seems silly to take a yellow banana as evidence that all ravens are black is that 'sampling the space of nonblack things' is not an accurate description of what we're doing when we look at a banana. When we see a raven, we do implicitly think it's more or less randomly drawn from the (local) population of ravens.

If you had grown up super-goth and only ever seen black things, you would have no idea what things have nonblack versions. If you went outside one day and saw a bunch of nonblack things and none of them were ravens, you might indeed start to suspect that all ravens were black; the more nonblack things you saw, the stronger this suspicion would get.

Comment author: Manfred 07 August 2014 04:07:27AM 0 points [-]

I agree. In the first example, it's because if our probability distribution only encompasses two categories, any increase in one is a decrease in the other. In the second example, it's because the ex-super-goth's hypothesis space includes all sorts of relationships between number of black things and number of nonblack things - their preconceptions about the world are different, rather than you just stipulating that they sample non-black things.