Previous Post Revised

I never bothered to ask: where are the sites presenting the pro-Guede innocence case?

How much of a distraction did you find my extremely confident probabilities to be from the substance of my arguments?

Very little. It isn't often that such estimates can be considered quantitative anyway. I usually interpret them as 'qualitative with pretty numbers'.

How much did those confident estimates make it seem like I was disagreeing, rather than agreeing, with the LW survey consensus? (It seemed to me that I had provoked people into trumpeting pro-guilt arguments more than they otherwise would have if I had initally given more "reasonable" numbers.)

The distinction I would make between the original and the edit is evaluating vs commentating. This was primed somewhat by an earlier comment and will naturally invoke more objections. It also brings into play the subjectivity and objectivity of probability estimates, as I discussed.

To what sorts of propositions, if any, do you yourself assign probabilities on the order of 0.999 or 0.001?

I usually only assign such probabilities when I am considering myself, literally, as a statistic. There are other matters of fact that I could assign probabilities of that order to but I don't particularly trust my own judgement at that level of certainty so don't usually bother with precise numbers. I certainly wouldn't assign them to any court cases over which there is any controversy. I would say "except if I was the alleged protagonist" but, as matt pointed out, I probably can't assign that probability even then except for the obvious rhetorical purposes.

How much of a distraction did you find my extremely confident probabilities to be from the substance of my arguments?

A big distraction. They made me strongly emotionally opposed to anything you had to say, and it was difficult to overcome my reaction.

How much did those confident estimates make it seem like I was disagreeing, rather than agreeing, with the LW survey consensus? (It seemed to me that I had provoked people into trumpeting pro-guilt arguments more than they otherwise would have if I had initally given more "reasonable" numbers.)

Very much. I definitely felt provoked into the pro-guilt position. But then again, I'm very stubborn and oppositional like that.

To what sorts of propositions, if any, do you yourself assign probabilities on the order of 0.999 or 0.001?

I would avoid assigning those kind of probabilities to political propositions, anything heavily polarized, or anything related to current events. In such cases it's very tempting to take one side or the other instead of looking at both objectively.

1) A big distraction. Since you were arguing that there had been a serious failure in rationality, giving an irrationally low estimate made me doubt your thought process.

2) Very much- it did seem like you were incredulous that even the less wrong community could possibly come up with such high estimates. Though to be fair, after reading your post, I downgraded my own estimate from 20% to 2%, so the 32% average estimate was still way too high.

3) The possibility that my friend's Rosacea is caused by excessive aspartame ingestion.

• How much of a distraction did you find my extremely confident probabilities to be from the substance of my arguments?

It was somewhat a distraction as it lead to a comment basically suggesting that your probabilities were too high. On the other hand I didn't keep me from revising my estimated of guilt downwards after reading your arguments.

• How much did those confident estimates make it seem like I was disagreeing, rather than agreeing, with the LW survey consensus? (It seemed to me that I had provoked people into trumpeting pro-guilt arguments more than they otherwise would have if I had initally given more "reasonable" numbers.)

A good deal. But you also quoted me as an example of bad reasoning about the case so I'm not sure you weren't disagreeing with me even though my estimation was in line with the LW consensus.

• To what sorts of propositions, if any, do you yourself assign probabilities on the order of 0.999 or 0.001?

In the Less Wrong survey a while back I recall assigning probabilities this low and lower to the truth of the Bible, the existence of God and the existence of ontological fundamental mental entities. I'm pretty sure a lot of other people did the same.

What general advice for yourself do you have as a result of this error? Presumably it's more than just "don't be so overconfident", since I'm guessing you asked yourself at the time whether you were being overconfident and concluded you weren't.

I noticed, but wasn't distracted.

It also seemed to me that assigning 0.001 to Knox's guilt was safer than assigning 0.999 to Guede's guilt, yet people who assigned extreme estimates wanted to assign equally extreme estimates to both. I'm not confident this is an error, though, because the case for Guede's guilt looks strong and it might be that in this state of evidence fewer than 1 in 1,000 people are innocent. On the other hand, I recall a strong tendency for people to say 0.10 and 0.90, 0.05 and 0.95, 0.01 and 0.99, or 0.001 and 0.999, and I don't see how that could happen naturally.

It looks to me like the clash between the concepts of "overconfidence and calibration" versus "privileging the hypothesis" may also be behind my horrible LHC inconsistency.