And it still doesn't make any sense. Think about the motion of a helium balloon. Think about the motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field. There's literally an infinite number of possible formal mathematical models that could include 12 frames of an apple falling. Thing about how enormous the leap of logic is to go from, "This one thing moved" to "All things must move the way that one thing does." There's quite simply not enough observations and not enough information in seeing something happen once to prove a theory. I feel like the reason people like this analogy is because an apple falling feels like something we understand, and so it's easy to imagine something smarter than us understanding it too, but we only understand apples falling because we've seen so many things fall.
How much of physics can you generalize from this image? If you want to really get an idea of how hard this problem is, try and tell me how much physics you can learn from this sound clip. It's the same information as the image, just presented in a format that doesn't allow you to easily access all of the incredibly difficult learning you've already done that allows you to easily interpret images.
That comment you link to walks directly through a correct chain of reasoning, and it has AI-Einstein miraculously picking the correct needle out of an infinite haystack. But it's a fiction story, and so horrendously improbably things are allowed to happen. The millions and billions of other possible theories that fit the data that tiny-boxed-Einstein could have also invented don't warrant a mention. How many curves can you draw that correctly fit two data points? There are an infinite number of possible theories and no amount of intelligence is going to allow you count to infinity any faster than anyone else.
it's a very obvious hypothesis to the right kind of Bayesian.
It's not at all clear to me what this means given the existence of Aumann's agreement theorem.
...it has AI-Einstein miraculously picking the correct needle out of an infinite haystack. But it's a fiction story, and so horrendously improbably things are allowed to happen.
I've been making similar complaints for years. And the replies I get are along the following lines:
Skeptic01: X is a highly conjunctive hypothesis. There's a lot of hand-waving, and arguments about things that seem true, but "seem true" is a pretty terrible argument.
LW-Member01: This is what we call the "unpacking fallacy" or "conjunction fallacy fallacy&...
I suggested recently that part of the problem with with LW was a lock of discussion posts which was caused by people not thinking of much to post about.
When I ask myself "what might be a good topic for a post?", my mind goes blank, but surely not everything that's worth saying that's related to rationality has been said.
So, is there something at the back of your mind which might be interesting? A topic which got some discussion in an open thread that could be worth pursuing?
If you've found anything which helps you generate useable ideas, please comment about it-- or possibly write a post on the subject.