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atucker comments on Rationality Quotes: February 2011 - Less Wrong
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-- Aristotle
"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks." -- Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
In Dirk Gently's universe, a number of everyday events involve hypnotism, time travel, aliens, or some combination thereof. Dirk gets to the right answer by considering those possibilities, but we probably won't.
I love this quote, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't describe it as "rational".
I think we could modify our sense of it to mean that if you are down to having to accept a 0.01% probability, because you've excluded everything else, then it's probably better to go back over your logic and see if there's any place you've improperly limited your hypothesis space.
Several paradigm-changing theories introduced concepts that would have previously been thought impossible (like special relativity, or many-worlds interpretation)
I don't understand this one.
The way I read it was that he's using "impossibilities" to mean things that you don't think are possible, don't understand, or find inconceivable rather than things which can't actually happen.
A probable impossibility is something that will probably happen that a given person doesn't think is possible. An improbable possibility is something that that same person understands, but (whether you know it or not) isn't probable.
I read 'probable impossibility' as 'something that is probably impossible'. It's a poor translation if it means something else; but your version at least makes some kind of sense.