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Vladimir_Nesov comments on The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory - Less Wrong
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If all you have is weak evidence, you can only end up "uncertain" if your prior says "uncertain", that is you expect the building to have been detonated or not about equally, before taking into account the way it collapsed. Which doesn't sound right. It seems that while evidence is weak, you should remain pretty confident that the building wasn't detonated.
I have several (well, two) relatively intelligent, mostly rational friends who have studied 9/11 theories in detail and come to the conclusion that there might actually be a conspiracy, so I'm setting my confidence intervals somewhat wide in this matter.
blinks
Of the "explosive in building" sort, or the "deliberately ignored intelligence" sort?
I think "explosive in the building" sort, though I haven't asked for the exact details.
It's either strong evidence, or privileging the hypothesis. Uncertainty is half-way from disbelief to conviction, it's not a trivial milestone. If you allow for a likelihood ratio of 10 to go either way from "uncertain", you are already changing level of belief between 1% and 99%. This is the opposite side of this situation: if you've just dropped or introduced a strong piece of evidence (like recalling that you haven't asked the details of what exactly is being claimed by the presumably reliable source), you can't be uncertain both before and after that.
I think we might have slightly different definitions for "undecided". I might consider a subjective belief of .95 for something not having happened as "undecided", if the associated weight of evidence isn't large.
Still, upon consideration, you're right. I've revised my estimate from "undecided" to "don't think there was a (malicious) conspiracy".
Right. So if you expect further investigation to change your belief (you can't know which way), you say it's undecided.
That's a pretty good way of describing it, yes.