ArisKatsaris comments on Raven paradox settled to my satisfaction - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Manfred 06 August 2014 02:46AM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 06 August 2014 08:41:06PM *  2 points [-]

It took me a bit to understand what you were saying. I think I'd have gotten it more clearly with some mathematical notation:

H1: The hypothesis that there exists at least one non-black ravens.
H2: The hypothesis that there exist zero non-black ravens.
YB: Observing a yellow banana when randomly picking an object to observe.

It's:

So if we assume that our priors for the hypotheses H1 and H2 are the same then if we also assume the additional constraint that P(YB|H1)=P(YB|H2) (both hypotheses refers to possible worlds with the same number of yellow bananas), then P(H1|YB) = P(H2|YB), meaning it doesn't provide more evidence for one hypothesis than the other.

However given possible worlds where e.g. the number of black ravens remains fixed, but the number of yellow bananas is reduced, the argument that observing a yellow banana increases the possiblity of the existence of black ravens becomes true.

Comment author: Manfred 07 August 2014 04:09:09AM *  0 points [-]

Well, it's not really the number of yellow bananas that matters. It's their measure in the probability distribution we're drawing from. In fact, I was unclear about that in the post, let me go add a note.