cousin_it comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 03 April 2012 12:42AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 04 April 2012 09:50:05AM *  1 point [-]

I seem to instinctively assign the ghost story a lower probability. The lesson of the quote might still be valid, can you come up with an example that would work for me?

Comment author: Alejandro1 04 April 2012 03:50:24PM 1 point [-]

Sure. Take one mathematical fact which the mathematical community accepts as true, but which has a complicated proof only recently published and checked. Surely your epistemic probability that there is a mistake in the proof and the theorem is false should be larger than the epistemic probability of the Gladstone story (if you are not convinced, add more outrageous details to it, like Gladstone telling the Queen "What's up, Vic?"). But according to your current beliefs, in the actual world the theorem is necessarily true and its negation impossible, while the Gladstone story is possible in the MWI sense.