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benelliott comments on Confidence levels inside and outside an argument - Less Wrong
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I was in some discussion at SIAI once and made an estimate that ended up being off by something like three hundred trillion orders of magnitude. (Something about giant look-up tables, but still.) Anyone outdo me?
Surely declaring "x is impossible", before witnessing x, would be the most wrong you could be?
The colloquial meaning of "x is impossible" is probably closer to "x has probability <0.1%" than "x has probability 0"
Probability zero and impossibility are not exactly the same thing. A possible event can have the probability 0. But an impossible event has the probability 0.
You are referring to the mathematical definition of impossibility, and I am well aware of the fact that it is different from probability zero (flipping a coin forever without getting tails has probability zero but is not mathematically impossible). My point is that neither of those is actually what most people (as opposed to mathematicians and philosophers) mean by impossible.