army1987 comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 25 November 2012 04:56:16PM *  6 points [-]

A better statement of this idea would be "If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)".

Er... if p(anthropogenic global warning is occurring | all publicly available evidence) is 85%, I'm not sure what I want is 85% of the people to tell me anthropogenic global warning is occurring and 15% of the people to tell me it's not.

Comment author: PeterisP 26 November 2012 11:19:55AM *  4 points [-]

Why not?

Of course, the best proportion would be 100% of people telling me that p(thewarming)=85%; but if we limit the outside opinions to simple yes/no statements, then having 85% telling 'yes' and 15% telling 'no' seems to be far more informative than 100% of people telling 'yes' - as that would lead me to very wrongly assume that p(thewarming) is the same as p(2+2=4).

Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2012 11:37:49AM 1 point [-]

but if we limit the outside opinions to simple yes/no statements

Why?