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drnickbone comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong Discussion

38 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 12:25PM

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Comment author: drnickbone 27 September 2012 09:48:34PM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure how well this fits with fallibilist accounts of knowledge (e.g. probabilism, Bayesianism). A Bayesian doesn't "rule out" possibilities when setting probabilities strictly between 0 or 1, so this technically looks like "skepticism". But if I claim that I'm 99.9999% certain that a mind-independent reality exists and I have substantial knowledge about it, that really doesn't sound very skeptical!

Comment author: pragmatist 28 September 2012 04:04:56AM *  0 points [-]

You can read "rule out" as "no longer take seriously". The probability of a hypothesis doesn't have to go down all the way to 0 before I stop taking it seriously. I've edited the original description to reflect this.

Comment author: drnickbone 28 September 2012 07:11:00AM 1 point [-]

Thanks for this clarification. I was going for "lean towards non-skeptical realism" but would say "accept non-skeptical realism" under your new formulation. I don't rule out a simulation hypothesis, for instance, but can't say I give it serious probability weighting. (Bostrom considers it one of three disjuncts, and I can give reasons to assign the other disjuncts much higher probability.)

Comment author: [deleted] 27 September 2012 10:25:26PM 0 points [-]

Exactly what I was going to say.