Vladimir_Nesov comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong

23 Post author: multifoliaterose 19 August 2010 10:47PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 August 2010 09:32:41AM *  0 points [-]

Your observations (of people claiming to having seen an angel, or a kangaroo) are distinct from hypotheses formed to explain those observations. If in a given case, you don't have reason to expect statements people make to be related to facts, then the statements people make taken verbatim have no special place as hypotheses.

Comment author: Unknowns 26 August 2010 04:54:53PM *  0 points [-]

"You don't have reason to expect statements people make to be related to facts" doesn't mean that you have 100% certainty that they are not, which you would need in order to invoke privileging the hypothesis.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 August 2010 05:09:51PM 1 point [-]

Why do you have at most 99.999999999% certainty that they are not? Where does that number one-minus-a-billionth come from?

Comment author: Unknowns 27 August 2010 01:19:49AM *  0 points [-]

The burden of proof is on the one claiming a greater certainty (although I will justify this later in any case.)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 August 2010 05:04:06PM *  0 points [-]

Now you are appealing to impossibility of absolute certainty, refuting my argument as not being that particular kind of proof. If hypothesis X is a little bit more probable than many others, you still don't have any reason to focus on it (and correlation could be negative!).

Comment author: Unknowns 27 August 2010 01:19:16AM -1 points [-]

In principle the correlation could be negative but this is extremely unlikely and requires some very strange conditions (for example if the person is more likely to say that Islam is true if he knows it is false than if he knows it is true).