Please substitute “certainty minus epsilon” for “certainty” wherever you see it in my post. It was not my intention to imply 100% certainty; just a confidence value so high that it amounts to the same thing for all practical purposes.
I don’t think “certainty minus epsilon” improves much. It moves it from theoretical impossibility to practical—but looking that far out, I expect “likelihood” might be best.
And where do SI claim even that? Obviously some of their discussions are implicitly conditioned on the fundamental assumptions behind their mission being true, but that doesn’t mean that they have extremely high confidence in those assumptions.
Please substitute “certainty minus epsilon” for “certainty” wherever you see it in my post. It was not my intention to imply 100% certainty; just a confidence value so high that it amounts to the same thing for all practical purposes.
I don’t think “certainty minus epsilon” improves much. It moves it from theoretical impossibility to practical—but looking that far out, I expect “likelihood” might be best.
I don’t understand your comment… what’s the practical difference between “extremely high likelihood” and “extremely high certainty” ?
And where do SI claim even that? Obviously some of their discussions are implicitly conditioned on the fundamental assumptions behind their mission being true, but that doesn’t mean that they have extremely high confidence in those assumptions.