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SoullessAutomaton comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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Hm. For actual aliens I don't think even that's justified, without either knowing more about their psychology, or having some sort of equally problematic prior regarding the psychology of aliens.
I was conditioning on the probability that the question is in fact meaningful to the aliens (more like "Will the Red Sox win the spelling bee?" than like "Does the present king of France's beard undertake differential diagnosis of the psychiatric maladies of silk orchids with the help of a burrowing hybrid car?"). If you assume they're just stringing words together, then there's not obviously a proposition you can even assign probability to.
Hey, maybe they're Zen aliens who always greet strangers by asking meaningless questions.
More sensibly, it seems to me roughly equally plausible that they might ask a meaningful question because the correct answer is negative, which would imply adjusting the prior downward; and unknown alien psychology makes me doubtful of making a sensible guess based on context.