So if you can find, say, ten reasons to do or believe something and no reasons not to, something is going on.
No, if you expect to find ten reasons to believe something, something is going on. If X is true it’s perfectly reasonable to have found ten pieces of evidence for X and none against it. Or am I missing something?
I listed one of the things that could be going on as one’s distribution being skewed, which however standardly happens for a distribution of one’s future probabilities as one veers away from .5, so I was confused and shouldn’t have listed it as a thing going on. I ended up defining “chunks of equal size” in an unreasonable way by relating them to binomial with p=.5, though the math is correct given that unreasonable definition. My brain barfed on that; sorry for making you read this. The idea for the post came more from a utility estimate being a random walk if one learns about independent random components to it, and I’m now rewriting the post in a way that’s correct.
(Whew, it took me a while to articulate the exact thing I did wrong.)
Hmm. I’m still trying to parse the post, and there seems to be something your argument might not have captured. Does it apply to value judgments? Say, if you find you have found a hundred apparently independent reasons for not hiring someone, does this fact demand an explanation?
The idea for this post came from something more like independent components in a utility function, and I stupidly extended it to belief updating when my brain made a barf not realizing probability distributions for future beliefs are usually skewed. I’ll depublish and maybe republish the valid part. Sorry for making you read that.
No, if you expect to find ten reasons to believe something, something is going on. If X is true it’s perfectly reasonable to have found ten pieces of evidence for X and none against it. Or am I missing something?
I listed one of the things that could be going on as one’s distribution being skewed, which however standardly happens for a distribution of one’s future probabilities as one veers away from .5, so I was confused and shouldn’t have listed it as a thing going on. I ended up defining “chunks of equal size” in an unreasonable way by relating them to binomial with p=.5, though the math is correct given that unreasonable definition. My brain barfed on that; sorry for making you read this. The idea for the post came more from a utility estimate being a random walk if one learns about independent random components to it, and I’m now rewriting the post in a way that’s correct.
(Whew, it took me a while to articulate the exact thing I did wrong.)
Hmm. I’m still trying to parse the post, and there seems to be something your argument might not have captured. Does it apply to value judgments? Say, if you find you have found a hundred apparently independent reasons for not hiring someone, does this fact demand an explanation?
The idea for this post came from something more like independent components in a utility function, and I stupidly extended it to belief updating when my brain made a barf not realizing probability distributions for future beliefs are usually skewed. I’ll depublish and maybe republish the valid part. Sorry for making you read that.