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shokwave comments on We are not living in a simulation - Less Wrong
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He completely correctly made the assumption that....
Would this phrasing illustrate the nuance I was aiming for better?
"Made the reasonable assumption" strikes me as most appropriate.
Interesting. I got completely stuck on shuffling around the existing words instead of looking for a substitute.
"Reasonable" may suffer from the same problem (immediately I can imagine "reasonable people don't go around Xing all the Ys") as correct, but to a lesser extent. At the very least, thanks for opening up my thought process on the matter.
Making assumptions usually trades off correctness for simplicity (which is often a good idea), raising merely likely to the status of certain. By its nature, making of assumptions won't be characterized by "complete correctness".
What I am aiming for is to be able to examine the process a person used in producing their assumption, compare it to a prototypical process that always produces the best possible assumption from all given knowledge, background knowledge, and prior distributions, and then be able to say "this person made the best possible assumption they could have possibly made under the circumstances".
Something similar to how you can look at a person making a bet and say whether they have made that bet correctly or not - before they win or lose.
It might be that 'correct' is simply contraindicated with 'assumption' and I have to find another way to express this.
A 50% chance of each outcome of a coin toss would not count as an assumption about the outcome in my sense.