= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SilasBarta comments on Privileging the Hypothesis - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (126)
I agree that privileging a hypothesis is a common error. I don't agree that it applies in the example used, though.
If you have a tradition thousands of years old saying that a particular spot was the site of Nazareth in 4BC, or of Troy in 1200BC, it isn't irrational to privilege the hypothesis that that spot was indeed the site of Nazareth, or of Troy.
Similarly, when the entire world has used the single-world hypothesis almost exclusively until the recent past, it isn't unfairly privileging it to still consider it a major contender.
You might think this is more like evolution vs. creationism. I don't mean that we should keep teaching creationism in school as an alternative today. But we haven't got as strong an argument for many-worlds as we do for evolution.
Also, AFAIK there's just these 2 competing hypotheses: One-world, many-world. We don't have the 7-worlds hypothesis and the 23-worlds hypothesis and the pi-worlds hypothesis. We could have the countable-worlds hypothesis and the uncountable-worlds hypothesis, but AFAIK we don't even have those. How can you say it's irrational to consider 1 of the only 2 hypotheses available?
Reminiscent of the guy who was asked what were the odds he would win the lottery, and replied, "Fifty-fifty, either I win or I don't." The corresponding heuristic-and-bias is I think known as "packing and unpacking" or something along those lines.
I remember the Daily Show had a funny example of this in action. They were interviewing people about the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth, and they talked to a physicist and a crazy survivalist. The former said it was impossible for the LHC to destroy the earth, while the latter used basically that argument: "There are two possibilities: it can destroy us, or not. So, that's about a 50/50 chance."
Then later the interviewer followed the survivalist to his bunker and asked him: if everyone died but them, don't they have an obligation to mate to repopulate the earth? (They were both men.) The survivalist said, "Um, no, because that doesn't work. It's impossible." And then the interviewer came back with, "well, there's two possibilities: we'll produce a baby, or we won't, so that's 50/50 -- pretty good odds."
I'm sure someone would love to dig up the clip...
Sure! Didn't take more than three years for someone to do that, either!
Though apparently your mind edited out how the interviewee's "there's a 0% chance it [them reproducing] will work" makes a great parallel with how John Ellis, who's otherwise amazing in this video, earlier explains that "there is 0% chance", "zero", of the LHC destroying the world[*]. Sigh.
(The clip is great from start to finish, but IMHO the funniest part is what John Oliver says in answer to "This place is perfectly safe" towards the end of the video. I was going to say that the only people it could be said to make fun of are annoying nitpickers, but on reflection, it's actually feels like a really great dig at people who make terrible arguments and want you to take them seriously, even though they really should realize the flaw themselves.)
[*] Technically, the video only suggests that it is world-destroying that Ellis claims to have "0% chance", and this is the Daily Show, but I think we can safely assume that ths is not selective editing to make him look like a bad Bayesian.