Sideways comments on Rationalists should beware rationalism - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 06 April 2009 02:16PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (30)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Sideways 07 April 2009 08:24:14PM 2 points [-]

If I correctly understand the distinction you're making between "untestable" and "meaningless", then the hypothesis "God rewards Christians with Heaven and everyone else goes to Hell" is untestable but not meaningless, correct?

I don't bother to work Bayes' Theorem on untestable hypotheses, simply because there are an infinite number of untestable hypotheses and I don't have time to formally do math on them all. This is more or less equivalent to assigning them zero probability.

I stand by my claim that it's improper to say that an untestable hypothesis is "more likely" or "less likely" than a testable hypothesis, or another untestable one. Just because people are known to assign arbitrary probabilities to untestable hypotheses, doesn't make it a good or useful thing to do.

Comment author: steven0461 08 April 2009 01:47:53PM *  2 points [-]

If I correctly understand the distinction you're making between "untestable" and "meaningless", then the hypothesis "God rewards Christians with Heaven and everyone else goes to Hell" is untestable but not meaningless, correct?

Yes, that's right. But in the evpsych context almost all hypotheses are at least meaningful, so we're drifting off the issue.

If you were unsure of evpsych story X, and you found a way to test it, would your probability for X go up? It shouldn't, and that's all I'm saying. The possibility of future evidence is not evidence.