New Thread On Sklansky Extrapolation Question

[PairTheBoard]

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it seems to me like you are just being captious and overcomplicating matters to try to find a specific instance where the answer is "no" to david's question

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Actually that's Tom Crowley's job to accuse me of being captious. Ironically, I was merely reiterating the analysis Tom Crowley gave on the other thread for this topic. The irony goes even deeper when you consider that David Sklansky has crowned Tom Crowley King of SMP posters, declaring that Tom Crowley has never made an incorrect post.

It's really not being captious here anyway. Sklanksy himself is not sure if his notion for extrapolating the trend is valid. I also doubt if Sklansky would object to introducing the idea of evidence evaluators estimating a Price on which of the Yes-No answers is correct as a means of deciding which answer to give. In fact his new formulation of the problem in terms of people skilled at getting Yes-No questions correct lends itself very naturally to those people estimating a Price on the answers. Especially since we know nothing about the type of question being asked.

So introducing the concept of Price and a distribution of opinion for that price as the model for the situation is something that really needs to be done in order to argue coherently about the possibilities of what's happening. Once we do that we can see that what you might think must be happening isn't necessarily the case and cannot be the only factor involved in deciding if it's logical to deduce the extrapolation result Sklansky hypothesises. It's not the slam dunk it might be if there were only one logical possible factor possible under Sklansky's assumptions. You can argue further based on guesses for relative sizes of categories of propositions that satisfy one factor or the other. But that argument is much more speculative.

Furthermore, it's not clear that Tom Crowley's model fits all types of propositions. The notion that the distribution for the opinions of Price behaves in some kind of aproximately normal way may not be the case for all types of propositions. There may very well be propositions where double humps can develop in the distribution, which is what Sklanksy envisioned in his original formulation of the problem. Crowley claims this phenomenon is not realistic and implies an irrational model. I'm not so sure about that myself. There may be questions that produce polarity of opinion among even the best human minds but which can still be answered definitively in the limit toward infinite intellegence. If so that would bring in even more categories of propositions for you to guess the relative sizes of.

PairTheBoard