All of DevilMaster's Comments + Replies

Finally! Someone who explains (as opposed to simply downvoting) the weak points in my reasoning!

You're right, the light horizon is something I had completely forgotten to take into consideration. Just as I read your comment, I was about to object that a FASI would be able to cheat and create wormholes or Tipler cylinders to violate causality and let us know it exists anyway... then I remembered that, even if it was capable to create them, they would not allow it to reach any point in time before their creation, so it would still be incapable to escape the boundaries of its own light horizon to reach ours.

Well, point taken.

Finally! Someone who explains (as opposed to simply downvoting) the weak points in my reasoning!

I downvoted the OP because it immediately pattern-matched to other well-meaning but misguided attempts to definitively answer a vague and complicated question, and further reading only confirmed it. This is typical of a novice poster and is not meant as an insult. Those who stick around eventually learn that all easy questions have been answered and hard questions require precise formulation, literature review, careful research and feedback from others. Hope the quality of your next post will be much better.

"So trying to explain the Force with little mindochondria is futile"

Like trying to explain magic with the presence of a particular gene? :-D (BTW, yes, I know that that gene is not the cause of magic in HPMOR, but similarly midichlorians are not the cause of the Force in Star Wars).

And as an extension:

"In the world where midichlorians are needed to explain the Force, the Force simply doesn't exist in the first place."

A parallel statement about HPMOR can be constructed from that: "In the world where a gene is needed to explain magic... (read more)

I just noticed this argument, I hope I'm not too late in expressing my view.

Premise: I want to live in the universe with the least amount of pain.

And now for some calculations. For the sake of quantification, let's assume that that the single tortured person will receive 1 whiplash per second, continuously, for 50 years. Let's also assume that the pain of 1 whiplash is equivalent to 1 "pain unit". Thus, if I chose to torture that person, I would add 3600 "pain units" per hour to the total amount of pain in the universe. In 1 day, the am... (read more)

"I wish that wishes would be granted as the wisher would interpret them".

1pengvado
Doesn't protect against a reflectively-consistent misinterpretation of "as the wisher would interpret them".
0FAWS
Doesn't protect against unforeseen consequences and is possibly underspecified (How should the wish work when it needs to affect things the wisher doesn't understand? Create a version of the wisher that does understand? What if there are multiple possible versions that don't agree on interpretations among each other?).

If we're not more likely to see them given that they're real than we are given that they're not real, then our inability to see them is not evidence in either direction. The test is a bad one because it fails to distinguish one possibility from the other

Thank you. That's what I did not understand.

If absence of proof is not proof of absence, but absence of evidence is evidence of absence, what makes proof different from evidence?

Example: we currently have no evidence supporting the existence of planets orbiting stars in other galaxies, because our telescopes are not powerful enough to observe them. Should we take this as evidence that no galaxy except ours has planets around its stars?

Another example: before the invention of the microscope, there was no evidence supporting the existence of bacteria because there were no means to observe them. Should've this fact alone been interpreted as evidence of absence of bacteria (even though bacteria did exist before microscopes were invented)?

5wedrifid
Yes we do. We have evidence about how physics (ie. gravity) works and about the formation phases of the universe. That earth and the other planets here exists is evidence. We just didn't happen to have one particular kind of evidence (seeing them). And no, until we developed (recently) the ability to see evidence of them ourselves you would not have been entitled to that piece of evidence either. Because we should not have expected to see them. Seeing planets with tech that should not see them would have been evidence that something else was wrong.
0JoshuaZ
Benelliot and others have explained this well, but note that we do have direct evidence for planets in other galaxies. We've had it for about two years.
2benelliott
Proof is absolute, evidence is probabilistic. No, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence if evidence is impossible, but it is evidence of absence if evidence is possible but absent. (try saying that quickly 3 times :)
0omeganaut
The simple answer is that absence of proof towards a possibility is not proof that that the possibility cannot exist, merely that there is no actual proof either way. However, in this specific case, the absence of evidence pointing towards the existence of a fifth column that is engaging in sabotage is evidence that indicates that the fifth column does not exist. I agree that the specific terminology is a bit confusing, but that is the simple explanation as to your question.

Hi DevilMaster, welcome to LessWrong!

Generally, the answer to your question is Bayes' Theorem. This theorem is essentially the mathematical formulation of how evidence ought to be weighed when testing ideas. If the wikipedia article doesn't help you much, Eliezer has written an in-depth explanation of what it is and why it works.

The specific answer to your question can be revealed by plugging into this equation, and defining "proof". We say that nothing is ever "proven" to 100% certainty, because if it were (again, according to Bayes' T... (read more)

0jimrandomh
Proof means "extremely strong evidence". Absence of proof and absence of evidence are both evidence of absence. Their strength is determined by the probability with which we'd expect to see them, conditional on the thing existing and not existing.