cupholder comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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I didn't bother listening to Craig's rebuttal, because I agree with you that what Ehrman's saying from 34:58 to 36:02 is poorly argued, and I don't even need Bayes' theorem to see it. My transcription of Ehrman:
But this is silly. If a historian, or anyone, can establish that X probably happened, they can establish that X's complement probably didn't happen (because P(X) + P(¬X) = 1). So how can Ehrman argue that history can establish what probably happened but not what probably didn't? I suspect there are other issues (like playing definitional games with the word 'miracle' and suggesting an event 'defies probability' - what would that even mean?) but his claims about what historians can and can't do is the most obvious issue to me.
I think we have a problem. While the default at LW is to not want to believe in possible miracles done by God, there's considerable interest in knowing whether we live in a simulation.
Aside from logic or from careful examination of physics which find indicators of another level, the other category of evidence for this world being a simulation is transient anomalies. How do you evaluate reports of anomalies?
I think my main rule of thumb is to think about how anomalous the anomaly is, and the strength of the evidence for it. More anomalous and less well substantiated anomalies get taken less seriously.