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.
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.