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entirelyuseless comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Comments (228)
It is a serious mistake to assume that because something could happen by natural laws, it is automatically more probable than something which would be a violation of natural laws.
For example, suppose I flipped a coin 10,000 times in a row and always got heads. In theory there are many possible explanations for this. But suppose by careful investigation we had reduced it to two possibilities:
Number 1 could theoretically happen by natural laws, number 2 could not. But number 2 is more probable anyway.
The same thing might well be true about explanations such as "a passing black hole that happens to create a violation of the laws of biochemistry." I see no reason to think that such things are more probable than the supernatural.
(That said, I agree that Eric is mistaken about this.)
Just to be clear, this is obviously not what is happening with Eric. But let's run with the scenario:
I would contest that this is not the case. If you think that n° 2 is more probable, I would say it's just measuring that the probability you assign to the supernatural is higher than 2^10k (besides, this is exactly Jaynes' suggested way to numerically estimate intuitive probabilities).
But your probability is just a prior: while n° 1 is justifiable by appealing to group invariance or symmetric ignorance, n° 2 just pops out of nowhere.
It certainly feels that n° 2 should be more probable, but the wrong answer also feels right in the Wason selection task.
This is what I was asking Eric: by what process were you able to eliminate every other possible explanation, so that the supernatural is the only remaining one?
I suspect also that, in your hypothetical scenario, this would be the same process hidden in the sentence "by careful investigation".