pragmatist comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 October 2012 10:49AM

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Comment author: pragmatist 19 October 2012 02:45:43PM *  0 points [-]

I'm having trouble parsing this comment. You seem to be granting that the BB's state is correlated with the top card (I'm assuming this is what you mean by "having the same probability"), that there is no direct causal link between the BB and the psychic, and that there are no common causes, but saying that this still doesn't necessarily violate the CMC. Am I interpreting you right? If I'm not, could you tell me which one of those premises does not hold in my example?

If I am interpreting you correctly, then you are wrong. The CMC entails that if X and Y are correlated, X is not a cause of Y and Y is not a cause of X, then there are common causes of X and Y such that the variables are independent conditional on those common causes.