evand comments on Thoughts on a possible solution to Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Dolores1984 01 August 2012 12:32PM

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Comment author: evand 01 August 2012 04:14:59PM 0 points [-]

If I flip a coin 100 times and get all heads, there are many, many hypotheses that suddenly get a lot more plausible. Perhaps the coin is strongly biased. In fact, a weak prior of slight bias will, post-update, seem much more plausible than the fair coin. Perhaps it's a double headed coin, and in my inspection I failed to notice that. It seems vanishingly unlikely that I would miss that on repeated inspection... but I'm still more inclined to believe that, than a mathematically fair coin coming up heads every time. Perhaps I've unconsciously learned how to predictably flip a coin. Perhaps I've failed horribly at counting, and actually only flipped the coin 10 times. Perhaps any of the above are combined with my not noticing a tails or ten appear in the result string.

In other words, exceedingly unlikely events will make me doubt my sanity before they make me start doubting math.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 August 2012 04:21:04PM 0 points [-]

Agreed with all of that. (Not sure if you think we disagree on any of it.)

Comment author: evand 01 August 2012 06:11:56PM 0 points [-]

I assumed you did. I just thought it worth explicitly adding to the discussion that considering only some extraordinarily weird ideas when discussing extraordinarily weird events is a form of bias that seems to run rampant in hypotheticals around here. It's not just the one aspect you mentioned where our confidence should be shaken by such a result.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 01 August 2012 08:34:52PM 0 points [-]

Ah, gotcha... sure, agreed on all counts.