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DataPacRat comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Coincidence or Correlation?
A couple of months ago, I postponed an overnight camping trip due to a gut feeing. I still haven't taken that particular trip, having focused on other activities.
Today, my local newspaper is reporting that a body was found in that park this morning. My natural human instinct is to think "That could have been me!"... but, of course, instincts are less trustworthy than other forms of thinking.
What are the odds that I'm a low-probability-branch Everett Immortality survivor? Do you think I should pay measurably more attention to such gut feelings in the future? What lessons, if any, are able to be drawn from these circumstances?
This sounds like a case of confirmation bias. In that if your "gut feeling" was never confirmed as something, you probably wouldn't remember having the gut feeling. You could have been waiting every day for the rest of your life, and still not have gotten the gut-success feeling.
That doesn't help you recalibrate about it, but I wouldn't be listening to gut any more or less in the future.
But the penultimate question is kinda answerable, isn't it? Have a Gut Feeling Journal and see for yourself whether GF works. It should be useful for calibration, at least, and also fun.
Also, DO pay more attention to crime reports and integrate them into your planning. I would have said seek out such reports, were your newspapers more diversified.
Since you are posting, you know you are an Everett branch survivor. Whether that branch is low-probability is, of course, impossible to tell.
That depends on gut feelings, but I see no reason to update based on this particular incident.
That you should not read the crime / police blotter sections of newspapers.
Hm... how sure should anyone be of that impossibility? For example, if the number of Everett branches isn't infinite, but merely, say, 10^120, then wouldn't it be hypothetically possible for a worldline that has relatively few other worldlines that are similar enough to interact on the quantum level to have to macroscopicly-observable effects?
Fair enough.
I don't; the local region has a small enough population that the main newspaper has only a single section to cover all local stories. Unsubscribing from the RSS feed with local crime stories would also unsubscribe me from local politics, events, fluff, and so forth.
The greatness of LW.
merely 10^120 :-D
Clearly, you do. I wasn't suggesting wearing blinders not to notice them, I suggested not reading them.