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Grognor comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion

13 [deleted] 03 July 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: Kindly 04 July 2012 12:10:30AM *  2 points [-]

Well, on a somewhat trivial note, I (plan to) make my living proving that certain things have probabilities distinct from 0, so if 0 and 1 weren't probabilities to begin with I'd be out of a job.

That's not really it, though, because I think the "0 and 1 are not probabilities" claim is really about degrees of belief in non-mathematical propositions. In its most-reasonable-to-me form, it says something like "Even if you have an argument that statement S is true with probability 1, you should believe Pr[S] < 1, because your argument could be wrong". And there's... really not a lot I could say in response to that. Except I would note that the value 1 isn't really special here.

But there's a lot of things that go together with this idea that I do disagree with. In very many senses, even non-mathematical propositions do end up having probabilities of 0 or 1. For instance:

  • Any time we deal with (even theoretical) infinities (this one is important because here we get events with probability 0 that can actually happen)
  • Tautologies (duh)
  • Conditional probabilities (nobody really disagrees with this, but I think lots of probabilities we think are unconditional aren't)
  • Any belief that I can never be talked out of (given how the human mind works, probably most beliefs we have are like this actually)

Plus in practice accepting "0 and 1 are not probabilities" rhetorically or otherwise just means that you stop writing 1 and start writing 1-epsilon. Whose belief is it really that doesn't affect anything?

Comment author: Grognor 04 July 2012 03:51:20AM *  1 point [-]

Any belief that I can never be talked out of (given how the human mind works, probably most beliefs we have are like this actually)

I suspect that with enough resources you could be talked out of any of your beliefs. Oh, sure, it would take a lot of time, planning, and manpower (and probably some people you approve of having the beliefs we'd want to indoctrinate you with). You're not actually 100% certain that you're 100% certain that 0 and 1 are probabilities.

The trouble with thinking 0 or 1 is a probability is that it is exactly equivalent to having an infinite amount of evidence, which is impossible by the laws of thermodynamics; minds exist within physics.

Furthermore, a feeling of absolute certainty isn't even a number, much less a probability.

Comment author: Kindly 04 July 2012 07:13:48PM *  1 point [-]

I suspect that with enough resources you could be talked out of any of your beliefs.

At some point you have to ask: who is this "me" that can have any arbitrary collection of beliefs?

(And yes, incidentally, I don't assign 100% probability to the fact that I assign 100% probability to the statement "0 and 1 are probabilities." I think I could be persuaded, not to have a lower confidence in the 0-1 statement, but to believe that my confidence in it is lower than it is. This is sort of hard to think about, though.)