While you appear to be right about phil's incorrect interpretation, I don't think he meant any malice by it...however, you appear to me to have meant malice in return. So, I think your comment borders on unnecessary disrespect and if it were me who had made the comment, I would edit it to make the same point while sounding less hateful. If people disagree with me, please down vote this comment. (Though admittedly, if you edit your comment now, we won't get good data, so you probably should leave it as is.)
I admit that I'm not factoring in your entire history with phil much so you may have further justification of which I'm unaware, but my view I would expect to be shared even more by casual readers who don't know either of you well. Maybe in that case, a comment like yours is fine, but only if delivered privately.
Agreed. Also, saying somebody is wrong and then not bothering to explain how does come across as somewhat rude, as it forces the other person to try to guess what they did wrong instead of providing more constructive feedback.
In passing, I said:
And lo, CronoDAS said:
To which I replied:
There's a certain resemblance here - though not an actual analogy - to the strange position your friend ends up in, after you test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
For those unfamiliar with QTI, it's a simple simultaneous test of many-worlds plus a particular interpretation of anthropic observer-selection effects: You put a gun to your head and wire up the trigger to a quantum coinflipper. After flipping a million coins, if the gun still hasn't gone off, you can be pretty sure of the simultaneous truth of MWI+QTI.
But what is your watching friend supposed to think? Though his predicament is perfectly predictable to you - that is, you expected before starting the experiment to see his confusion - from his perspective it is just a pure 100% unexplained miracle. What you have reason to believe and what he has reason to believe would now seem separated by an uncrossable gap, which no amount of explanation can bridge. This is the main plausible exception I know to Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
Pity those poor folk who actually win the lottery! If the hypothesis "this world is a holodeck" is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck. (I.e. to believe that the universe is such that most conscious observers observe ridiculously improbable positive events.)
It's a sad situation to be in - but don't worry: it will always happen to someone else, not you.