Baruta07 comments on 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 January 2008 06:58AM

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Comment author: j.edwards 10 January 2008 07:49:18AM 6 points [-]

It's difficult to assign probability to incoherent statements, because since we can't mean anything by them, we can't assert a referent to the statement -- in that sense, the probability is indeterminate (additionally, one could easily imagine a language in which a statement such as "the green is either" has a perfectly coherent meaning -- and we can't say that's not what we meant, since we didn't mean anything). Recall also that each probability zero statement implies a probability one statement by its denial and vice versa, so one is equally capable of imagining them, if in a contrived way.

Comment author: Baruta07 31 October 2012 04:51:08PM 0 points [-]

Putting this in a slightly more coherent way. (I was having some trouble understanding the explanation, so I broke it down into layman's terms, might make it more easily understandable)

If I assign P(0) to "Green is either" Then I assign P(1) to the statement "Green is not either"

If you assign absolute certainty to any one statement you are, by definition assigning absolute impossibility to all other possibilities.