ActionItem comments on Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Certain That 53 Is Prime - Less Wrong

38 Post author: ChrisHallquist 07 November 2013 07:45AM

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Comment author: ActionItem 09 November 2013 09:41:55AM -1 points [-]

Craig is just purposely conflating the likelihood of a particular result and the likelihood of given the declaration of a result by the lottery officials, that result being true.

If you and I are flipping coins for a million dollars, it's going to take a lot of convincing evidence that I lost the coin flip before I pay up. You just cannot flip the coin in another room where I can't even see, and then expect me to pay up because, well, the probability of heads is 50% and I shouldn't be so surprised to learn that I lost.

Therefore, the actual likelihood of a particular set of lottery numbers is totally irrelevant in this discussion.

In any case, the only kind of "evidence" that we have been presented for miracles has always been of the form "person X says Y happened', which has been known as hearsay and dealt with without even bothering with probability theory.