Comment on The Importance of Self-Doubt

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:39:54 GMT

Whoops, you're right. Sorry. I didn't quite realize you were talking about the universal prior again :-)

But I think the argument can still be made to work. P(H) doesn't depend only on the complexity of Islam - we must also take into account the internal structure of Islam. For example, the hypothesis "A and B and C and ... and Z" has the same complexity as "A or B or C or ... or Z", but obviously the former is way less probable. So P(H) and P(E) have the same term for complexity, but P(H) also gets a heavy "conjunction penalty" which P(E) doesn't get because people are susceptible to the conjunction fallacy.

It's slightly distressing that my wrong comment was upvoted.

Discuss