Comment on Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:41:47 GMT

I know what SI is. I'm not even pushing the point that SI not always the best thing to do - I'm not sure if it is, as it's certainly not free of assumptions (such as the choice of the programming language / Turing machine), but let's not go into that discussion.

The point I'm making is different. Imagine a world / universe where nobody has any idea what SI is. Would you be prepared to speak to them, all their scientists, empiricists and thinkers and say that "all your knowledge is purely accidental, you unfortunately have absolutely no methods for determining what the truth is, no reliable methods to sort out unlikely hypotheses from likely ones - while we, incidentally, do have the method and it's called Solomonoff induction"? Because it looks like what iarwain1 is saying implies that. I'm sceptical of this claim.

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