I see; I did misunderstand, but I think I get your point now. You're not claiming that if only Mr. Feynman had known about the limits of free will he could have avoided a burn; you're saying that, like all good rationalists everywhere, I should only want to believe true things, and it is unlikely that "I have free will" is a true thing, because sometimes smart people think that and turn out to be wrong.
Well, OK, fair enough, but it turns out that I get a lot of utility out of believing that I have free will. I'm happy to set aside that belief if there's some specific reason why the belief is likely to harm me or stop me from getting what I want. One of the things I want is to never believe a logically inconsistent set of facts, and one of the things I want is to never ignore the appropriately validated direct evidence of my senses. That's still not enough, though, to get me to "don't believe things that have a low Bayesian prior and little or no supporting evidence." I don't get any utility out of being a Bayesianist per se; worshipping Bayes is just a means to an end for me, and I can't find the end when it comes to rejecting the hypothesis of free will.
Robin, I've liked your comments both on this thread and others that we've had, but I can't afford to continue the discussion any time soon -- I need to get back to my thesis, which is due in a couple of weeks. Feel free to get in the last word; I'll read it and think about it, but I won't respond.
I place a very low probability on my having genuine 'free will' but I act as if I do because if I don't it doesn't matter what I do. It also seems to me that people who accept nihilism have life outcomes that I do not desire to share and so the expected utility of acting as if I have free will is high even absent my previous argument. It's a bit of a Pascal's Wager.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"