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gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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I would expect heavier tails than that. (For other questions besides that of gods, too.) I'd expect that there might be dozens of reasons providing half a bit or so.
For what it's worth, I might rate it at maybe 7 bits. Whether I'm a reasonable and intelligent person isn't for me to say :-).
Fair enough. That 80% figure was kindof pulled out of nowhere, really.
You think the theistic explanation might be as much as a hundred times more complex?
...there may be some element of my current position biasing my estimate, but that does seem a little excessive.
So far as this debate goes, my impression is that you either are both reasonable and intelligent or you're really good at faking it.
No, as much as seven bits more complex. (More precisely, I think it's probably a lot more more-complex than that, but I'm quite uncertain about my estimates.)
Damn, you caught me. (Seriously: I'm pretty sure that being really good at faking intelligence requires intelligence. I'm not so sure about reasonable-ness.)
One bit is twice as likely.
Seven bits are two-to-the-seven times as likely, which is 128 times.
...surely?
I can think of a few ways to fake greater intelligence then you have. Most of them require a more intelligent accomplice, in one way or another. But yes, reasonableness is probably easier to fake.
128x more unlikely but not 128x more complex; for me, at least, complexity is measured in bits rather than in number-of-possibilities.
[EDITED to add: If anyone has a clue why this was downvoted, I'd be very interested. It seems so obviously innocuous that I suspect it's VoiceOfRa doing his thing again, but maybe I'm being stupid in some way I'm unable to see.]
...I thought that the ratio of likeliness due to the complexity argument would be the inverse of the ratio of complexity. Thus, something twice as complex would be half as likely. Is this somehow incorrect?
(I have no idea why it was downvoted)
All else being equal, something that takes n bits to specify has probability proportional to 2^-n. So if hypothesis A takes 110 bits and hypothesis B takes 100, then A is about 1000x less probable.
Exactly what "all else being equal" means is somewhat negotiable.
Anyway, the point is that the natural way to measure complexity is in bits, and probability varies exponentially, not linearly, with number of bits.
Yes, and hypothesis A is also 1024x as complex - since it takes ten more bits to specify.
...it seems that our disagreement here is in the measure of complexity, and not the measure of probability. My measure of complexity is pretty much the inverse of probability, while you're working on a log scale by measuring it in terms of a number of bits.
Yes, apparently we're using the word "complexity" differently.
So, getting back to what I said that apparently surprised you: Yes, I think it is very plausible that the best theistic explanation for everything we observe around us is what I call "7 bits more complex" and you call "128x more complex" than the best non-theistic explanation; just to be clear what that means, I mean that if we could somehow write down a minimal-length complete description of what we see (compressing it via computer programs / laws of physics / etc.) subject to the constraint "must not make essential use of gods", and another subject instead to the constraint "must make essential use of gods", then my guess at the length of the second description is >= 7 bits longer than my guess at the length of the first. Actually I think the second description would have to be much longerer than that, but I'm discounting because this is confusing stuff and I'm far from certain that I'm right.
And you, if I'm understanding you correctly, are objecting not so much "no, the theistic description will be simpler" as "well, maybe you're right that the nontheistic description will be simpler, but we should expect it to be simpler by less than one random ASCII character's worth of description length".
Of course the real diffiulty here is that we aren't in a position to say what a minimal length theistic or nontheistic description of the universe would look like. We have a reasonable set of laws of physics that might form the core of the nontheistic description, but (1) we know the laws we have aren't quite right, (2) it seems likely that the vast bulk of the complexity needed is not in the laws but in whatever arbitrary-so-far-as-we-know boundary conditions[1] need to be added to get our universe rather than a completely different one with the same laws, and we've no idea how much information that takes or even whether it's finite. And on the theistic side we have at most a pious hope that something like "this is the best of all possible worlds" might suffice, but no clear idea of how to specify what notion of "best" is appropriate, and the world looks so much unlike the best of all possible worlds according to any reasonable notion that this fact is generally considered one of the major reasons for disbelieving in gods. So what hope have we of figuring out which description is shorter?
[1] On some ways of looking at the problem, what needs specifying is not so much boundary conditions as our location within a vast universe or multiverse. Similar problem.
It is confusing. I'm still not even convinced that the theist's description would be longer, but my estimation is so vague and has such massively large error bars that I can't say you're wrong, even if what you're saying is surprising to me.
More or less. I'm saying I would find it surprising if the existence of God made the universe significantly more complex. (In the absolutely minimal-length description, I expect it to work out shorter, but like I say above, there are massive error bars on my estimates).
While I've heard this argued before, I have yet to see an idea for a world that (a) is provably better, (b) cannot be created by sufficient sustained human effort (in an "if everyone works together" kind of way) and (c) cannot be taken apart by sustained human effort into a world vaguely resembling ours (in an "if there are as many criminals and greedy people as in this world").
I'm not saying that there isn't nasty stuff in this world. I'm just not seeing a way that it can be removed without also removing things like free will.
Very little, really. There's a lot of unknowns.