Rationality Quotes May 2013

katydee

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

You shouldn't trust people who claim to know 4 digits of accuracy for a forcast like this.

You shouldn't trust a human person who makes that claim. But if we are using 'person' in a way that includes the steel-Vulcan from the quote then yes, you should.

The uncertainity involved in the calculation has to be greater.

It is all uncertainty. There is no particular reason to doubt the steel-Vulcan's ability to calibrate 'meta' uncertainties too.

In the face of all the other evidence about the relative capabilities of the species in question that the character in question is implied to have it would be an error to overvalue the heuristic "don't trust people who fail to signal humility via truncating calculations". The latter is, after all, merely a convention. Given the downsides of that convention (it inevitably makes predictions worse) it is relatively unlikely that the Vulcans would have the same traditions regarding significant figure expression.

And lo, Wedrifid did invent the concept of Steel Vulcan and it was good.

Do we actually have enough fictional examples of this to form a trope? (At least 3, 5 would be better.)

0ChristianKl13y

There inherent uncertainity in the input. The steel-Vulcan in question counted one specifc case as being 24% relevant to the current question. That's two digits of accuracy. If many of your input variables only have two digits of accuracy the end result shouldn't have four digits of accuracy.

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Rationality Quotes May 2013

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Rationality Quotes May 2013

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