Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Confidence levels inside and outside an argument - Less Wrong

129 Post author: Yvain 16 December 2010 03:06AM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 16 December 2010 03:41:27PM 23 points [-]

Anthropic reasoning only goes this far. Even if I accept the silliness in which zillion of Earths are destroyed every year for each one that survives... the other planets in the solar system could also have been destroyed. And the stars and galaxies in the sky would all be devoured by now, no? And no anthropic reasons would prevent us from witnessing that from a safe distance.

Here's a fun game: Try to disprove the hypothesis that every single time someone says "Abracadabra" there's a 99.99% chance that the world gets destroyed.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 December 2010 05:09:44PM 3 points [-]

I should like to know Yvain's prior on this.

Comment author: Yvain 18 December 2010 04:25:51PM *  0 points [-]

On the "abracadabra" example? The overwhelming majority would come from the possibility that any time anything whatsoever happens the world is "destroyed", for some weird, maybe anthropic use of the word "destroyed" I don't understand compatible with me still being here.

If we limit it to "abracadabra" and nothing else, that's complex enough that < 1/trillion just picking it out of hypothesis space (lots of combinations of sounds that could destroy the world, lots of things that aren't combinations of sounds).