[jamesaguilar]

Because I believe P(service available to me | I'm paying for it) is higher than P(service available to me | I'm not paying for it) for most services where both are an option. I'm not going to go into all the reasons for that belief. I'm sure you're a creative person and can guess some of them. Suffice it to say that I think there is some reason to believe it. If you don't, by all means run your important business processes off of charity-ware.

[coldtea]

Seems like a fallacy to me.

It's not as clear cut as the P vs P you make it be, anyway. In many cases you're better of with Google that with some _small_ paying service your paying $20/month to use, merely because Google has more money/people/tech to spend on making the service better, avoiding to fall under, etc.

As for paying a _large_ company to their service, well, if you're like 0.001% of the profits of the service you're paying for, you're not much of a customer with influence, no matter how much you pay. And in most pay-for services you are just that, a small decimal percentage of their business.

Now you could count on your interests aligned with the other customers (so that they could not annoy you without annoying a large percentage of their users) but there lots of cases where that's not the case.

[jamesaguilar]

I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it.

[coldtea]

>I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it.

The fallacy that those are "rationally derived probability estimates" instead of numbers pulled out of one's arse in the first place.

What gave you the impression that putting random intuition numbers on the P(paid)/P(free) boxes makes it "rationally derived"?

If you didn't do that, what's your methodology, and where are the source numbers of your empirical research one the matter?

[jamesaguilar]

> random intuition numbers

Are you talking about intuition numbers, or random numbers? They are fundamentally different things.

Empirical research is not the only kind of rational evidence. See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evidence

[coldtea]

>Are you talking about intuition numbers, or random numbers? They are fundamentally different things.

Not if your intuition is based on random feelings and thoughts instead of "empirical research".

[lutusp]

>> Are you talking about intuition numbers, or random numbers? They are fundamentally different things.

> Not if your intuition is based on random feelings and thoughts instead of "empirical research".

Actually, "random feelings" and "random numbers" really are different things. A random feeling occurs in the context of a particular individual's possible spectrum of feelings, a small subset of all feelings. But by definition, a specific random number must spring from an infinite set of random numbers to meet the technical meaning of "random".