Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Justifying Induction - Less Wrong

1 Post author: Unknowns 22 August 2010 11:13AM

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Comment author: Unknowns 22 August 2010 04:29:56PM *  0 points [-]

Replying to your edit:

Without induction, you cannot update on evidence, because "evidence" is a hollow concept.

Still wrong. As I pointed out in the main post, "The sun will rise tomorrow" has a probability of 1.0 given that "The sun will rise for the next 10,000 days." This means that the sun rising tomorrow is evidence that the sun will rise for the next 10,000 days, without presupposing induction.

For example, I might originally be convinced that the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is one in a billion, and the probability of it rising for the next 10,000 days, one in a google; i.e. I am convinced that induction is wrong and the future will not be like the past. Nonetheless Bayes' theorem inexorably forces me to update in favor of the sun rising for the next 10,000 days, if it rises tomorrow.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 22 August 2010 05:55:44PM 0 points [-]

Still wrong. As I pointed out in the main post, "The sun will rise tomorrow" has a probability of 1.0 given that "The sun will rise for the next 10,000 days." This means that the sun rising tomorrow is evidence that the sun will rise for the next 10,000 days, without presupposing induction.

Right. Induction only comes in when I infer, from the sun's rising tomorrow, that it will rise on the 9,999 days after tomorrow.