Nick_Tarleton comments on Advancing Certainty - Less Wrong

34 Post author: komponisto 18 January 2010 09:51AM

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Comment author: Morendil 18 January 2010 04:15:52PM *  1 point [-]

How do you get from "uncertainty exists in the map, not the territory" to the following ?

given sufficient information about how-the-world-is, one's probability estimate could be made arbitrarily close to 0

One's uncertainty about the here-and-now, perhaps. In criminal cases we are dealing with backward inference, and information is getting erased all the time. Right about now perhaps the only way you could get "arbitrarily close to 0" is by scanning Knox's brain or the actual perpetrator's brain; if both should die, we would reach a state of absolute uncertainty about the event, all the evidence you could in principle examine to reach certainty will have been rearranged into unintelligible patterns.

Similarly, I can't shake the notion that the physical distance between you and the evidence should constrain how much strength you think the evidence has, just as much as the temporal distance eventually must.

I could be wrong about that, and I have already come around to your point of view somewhat, but you seem to have a blind spot about this particular objection: you're just some guy who got his information about the case from the Internet (which is fine, so is almost everyone).

Your comparison between the Amanda Knox case and scientific knowledge leaves me cold. Science is concerned with regularities, situations where induction applies; the knowledge sought in a criminal case is of a completely different kind, by definition applying to a unique and hopefully irregular situation.

Yes, I agree that improved "epistemic technology" is grounds for more confidence, even in cases such as this one; but your argument would be improved by throttling back the eloquence - you have at times sounded like a defence lawyer - and focusing more on the concrete details of your argument.

You'd do more to convince me if you observed, for instance, how the Web has allowed you access to multiple reports about the case, improving your chances that the biases in each source would cancel each other out, and the facts that remain are (as you claim) basically all there is to know. Pre-Internet you would have had to rely on one or two "official" news sources. That is also part of "epistemic technology".

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 18 January 2010 07:56:17PM 1 point [-]

Right about now perhaps the only way you could get "arbitrarily close to 0" is by scanning Knox's brain or the actual perpetrator's brain; if both should die, we would reach a state of absolute uncertainty about the event, all the evidence you could in principle examine to reach certainty will have been rearranged into unintelligible patterns.

This may be true if you measure from inside the universe, but certainly isn't if you can measure from outside, including observing other quantum branches. (Hey, you did say "in principle.")