Will_Sawin 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: Daniel_Burfoot 16 December 2010 05:43:11PM 5 points [-]

And no anthropic reasons would prevent us from witnessing that from a safe distance.

I accept this counter-argument.

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

This is unlikely because it is wildly incompatible with everything we know about physics, not because we have never observed it to happen. It is unlikely because it has an extremely low prior probability, not because we have any (direct) evidence against it.