I agree, and I don’t think this contradicts or undermines the argument of the post.
These experiments should definitely shift physicists’ probabilities by some nonzero amount; the question is how much. When they calculate that the probability of a marble statue waving is 10 to the minus gazillion, would you really want to argue that, based on surveys like this, they should adjust that to some mundane quantity like 0.01? That seems absurd to me. But if you grant this, then you have to concede that “epistemic bootstrapping” beyond ordinary human levels of confidence is possible. Then the question becomes: what’s the limit, given our knowledge of physics (present and future)?
If you did see a marble statue wave, after making this calculation, you would resurrect a hypothesis at the one-in-a-million level maybe (someone played a hugely elaborate prank on you involving sawing off a duplicate statue’s arm and switching that with the recently examined statue while you were briefly distracted by a phone ringing, say), not a hypothesis at the 10 to the minus whatever (e.g. you are being simulated by Omega for laughs).
Perhaps I’m getting this wrong, but this seems similar in spirit to the “queer uses of probability” discussion in Jaynes, where he asks what kind of evidence you’d have to see to believe in ESP, and you can take the probability of that as an indication of your prior probability for ESP.
Perhaps you’re making too much of absolute probabilities, when in general what we’re interested in is choosing between two or more competing hypotheses.
I agree, and I don’t think this contradicts or undermines the argument of the post.
These experiments should definitely shift physicists’ probabilities by some nonzero amount; the question is how much. When they calculate that the probability of a marble statue waving is 10 to the minus gazillion, would you really want to argue that, based on surveys like this, they should adjust that to some mundane quantity like 0.01? That seems absurd to me. But if you grant this, then you have to concede that “epistemic bootstrapping” beyond ordinary human levels of confidence is possible. Then the question becomes: what’s the limit, given our knowledge of physics (present and future)?
If you did see a marble statue wave, after making this calculation, you would resurrect a hypothesis at the one-in-a-million level maybe (someone played a hugely elaborate prank on you involving sawing off a duplicate statue’s arm and switching that with the recently examined statue while you were briefly distracted by a phone ringing, say), not a hypothesis at the 10 to the minus whatever (e.g. you are being simulated by Omega for laughs).
Perhaps I’m getting this wrong, but this seems similar in spirit to the “queer uses of probability” discussion in Jaynes, where he asks what kind of evidence you’d have to see to believe in ESP, and you can take the probability of that as an indication of your prior probability for ESP.
Perhaps you’re making too much of absolute probabilities, when in general what we’re interested in is choosing between two or more competing hypotheses.
This comment reads as if you’re disagreeing with me about something (“you’re making too much...”), but I can’t detect any actual disagreement.