wedrifid comments on What Bayesianism taught me - LessWrong

62 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 12 August 2013 06:59AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 12 August 2013 05:14:55PM 9 points [-]

By the same token, my mentioning here the name of the monster Ygafalkufeoinencfhncfc is evidence that it exists.

True.

Funnily enough, the same reasoning provides evidence for the monster Grrapoeiruvnenrcancaef and a VERY large number of other, ahem, creatures.

No it doesn't. Most of the creatures in that class have, in fact, not been mentioned by you or anyone else.

That doesn't look useful to me.

Also true.

Comment author: Kawoomba 12 August 2013 05:31:41PM *  0 points [-]

No it doesn't. Most of the creatures in that class have, in fact, not been mentioned by you or anyone else.

If one of dem monsters exists, that would be evidence that more of dem monsters exist.

Realize then that a conclusion of "one of those monsters exists" is just assigning a high probability. It follows that just increasing the probability of "one of those monsters exists" also increases the probability ýou'd assign to more monsters of its class existing. It's a continuous updating relationship, there's no discontinuous jump in the belief in other monsters of the class which only occurs once you're sure that one of them exists.

Compare this to seeing an alien-engineered kaiju and then being less surprised at Godzilla (even if that's only in a neighboring class).

Comment author: Lumifer 12 August 2013 05:30:26PM 0 points [-]

Most of the creatures in that class have, in fact, not been mentioned by you or anyone else.

True. But then I can write a one-line Perl script which will bring into being evidence for a LOT of monsters.

Which itself brings into being the question of what kind of evidence the output of a RNG is. Or, perhaps, what kind of evidence does software produce.

Comment author: Jiro 12 August 2013 06:06:51PM 4 points [-]

I'd think that how much mentioning a monster updates the probability that it exists depends on the context of mentioning the monster. Furthermore, mentioning it in the context of examples of probability should score particularly low in this regard.