= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Newsome comments on Best shot at immortality? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (85)
"6.9 out of 7" is such a weird probability that I wonder if Dawkins just made it up on the fly or something.
It comes from his 7 point scale for measuring belief along the theist/atheist spectrum.
That makes sense. It still seems to be more of a rhetorical tool to illustrate that there is a spectrum of subjective belief. People tend to lump important distinctions like these together: "all atheists think they know for certain there isn't a god" or "all theists are foaming at the mouth and have absolute conviction", so for a popular book it's probably a good idea to come up with this sort of scale like this, to encourage people to refine their categorization process. I kind of doubt that he meant it to be used as a tool for inferring Bayesian confidence (in particular, I doubt 6.9 out of 7 is meant to be fungible with P(god exists) = .01428).
Given that he's pretty disposed to throwing out rhetorical statements, I'd say that's a reasonable hypothesis. I'd be surprised if there was more behind it than simply recognizing that his subjective belief in any religion was 'very, very low', and just picking a number that seemed to fit.