Recently I’ve been thinking that a significant cause of the epsilon fallacy is that perception is by-default logarithmic (which in turn I think is because measurement error tends to be proportional to the size of the measured object, so if you scale things by the amount of evidence you have, you get a logarithmic transformation). Certain kinds of experience(?) can give a person an ability to deal with the long-tailed quantities inherent to each area of activity, but an important problem in the context of formalizing rationality and studying AIs is figuring out what kinds of experiences those are. (Interventions seem like one potential solution, but they’re expensive. More cheaply it seems like one could model it observationally with the right statistical model applied to a collider variable… Idk.)
Recently I’ve been thinking that a significant cause of the epsilon fallacy is that perception is by-default logarithmic (which in turn I think is because measurement error tends to be proportional to the size of the measured object, so if you scale things by the amount of evidence you have, you get a logarithmic transformation). Certain kinds of experience(?) can give a person an ability to deal with the long-tailed quantities inherent to each area of activity, but an important problem in the context of formalizing rationality and studying AIs is figuring out what kinds of experiences those are. (Interventions seem like one potential solution, but they’re expensive. More cheaply it seems like one could model it observationally with the right statistical model applied to a collider variable… Idk.)