cousin_it comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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It seems to me that even if you know that there is a Doldun game, played by exactly two teams, of which one is Strigli, which game exactly one team will entirely win, 50% is as high as you should go. If you don't have that much precise information, then 50% is an extremely generous upper bound for how likely you should consider a Strigli win. The space of all meaningful false propositions is hugely larger than the space of all meaningful true propositions. For every proposition that is true, you can also contradict it directly, and then present a long list of indirectly contradictory statements. For example: it is true that I am sitting on a blue couch. It is false that I am not on a blue couch - and also false that I am on a red couch, false that I am trapped in carbonite, false that I am beneath the Great Barrier Reef, false that I'm in the Sea of Tranquility, false that I'm equidistant between the Sun and the star Polaris, false that... Basically, most statements you can make about my location are false, and therefore the correct answer to most yes-or-no questions you could ask about my location is "no".
Basically, your prior should be that everything is almost certainly false!
The odds of a random sentence being true are low, but the odds of the alien choosing to give you a true sentence are higher.
A random alien?
No, just a random alien that (1) I encountered and (2) asked me a question.
The two conditions above restrict enormously the general class of “possible” random aliens. Every condition that restricts possibilities brings information, though I can't see a way of properly encoding this information as a prior about the answer to said question.
[ETA:] Note that I don't necessarily accept cousin_it's assertion, I just state my interpretation of it.