drnickbone 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: drnickbone 12 August 2014 10:37:09PM *  1 point [-]

One very simple resolution: observing a white shoe (or yellow banana, or indeed anything which is not a raven) very slightly increases the probability of the hypothesis "There are no ravens left to observe: you've seen all of them". Under the assumption that all observed ravens were black, this "seen-em-all" hypothesis then clearly implies "All ravens are black". So non-ravens are very mild evidence for the universal blackness of ravens, and there is no paradox after all.

I find this resolution quite intuitive.