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.

Lumifer comments on Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 10 August 2015 07:29AM

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

Comments (283)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Lumifer 12 August 2015 03:27:43PM *  1 point [-]

The main restriction would be to pick "important" predictions, whatever "important" means here.

I don't know if there is any useful algorithm here. The space of possibilities is vast, black swans lurk at the outskirts, and Murphy is alive and well :-/

You can try doing something like this:

  • List the important (to you) events or outcomes in some near future
  • List everything that could potentially affect these events or outcomes.

and you get your universe of "events of interest" to assign probabilities to.

I doubt this will be a useful exercise in practice, though.

Comment author: btrettel 12 August 2015 04:01:41PM 0 points [-]

Yes, upon reflection, it seems that something along these lines is probably the best I can do, and you're right that it probably will not be useful.

I'll give it a try and evaluate whether I'd want to try again.