Unknown comments on Surface Analogies and Deep Causes - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 June 2008 07:51AM

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Comment author: Unknown 23 June 2008 12:28:07PM -1 points [-]

Caledonian, I didn't say that the Razor leads to the conclusion that "it is more probable that two things which share a property are identical than not." The Razor leads to the conclusion that "the two things are identical" is more likely than some other specific hypothesis that they are not identical in some specific way.

There are of course an infinite number of ways in which two things can fail to be identical, so in order to compare the probability that the two are identical with the probability that they are not, we have to sum the probabilities for all the ways they could fail to be identical; and thus the conclusion will be that they are more likely not identical than identical, as you correctly stated.

If you look back, though, you will see that I never said anything opposed to this anyway.