If I understood you correctly you write “the government is ready to conduct massively risky operations that kill thousands of its own citizens as a publicity stunt” as a statement of fact.
I didn’t write it as a fact, I wrote it as an assumption whose validity is being evaluated.
Here’s an attempt to reword it to make this clearer:
“Others thought that the conspiracy argument required the government to be ready to conduct, as a publicity stunt, massively risky operations that kill thousands of its own citizens. They considered their prior for this hypothetical and judged it overwhelmingly unlikely in comparison to priors such as ‘lots of unlikely-seeming things show up by coincidence once you dig deeply enough’.”
Wording it that way makes it clearer that it is an assumption by the hypothetical characters. Though based on our previous discussions I suspect that it also reflects your assumption and maybe that’s why you failed to clearly distinguish it from the characters’ assumptions in the OP. At least myself and woozle took objection to it. Of course it is also a possibility that we are both reading impaired.
I didn’t write it as a fact, I wrote it as an assumption whose validity is being evaluated.
Here’s an attempt to reword it to make this clearer:
“Others thought that the conspiracy argument required the government to be ready to conduct, as a publicity stunt, massively risky operations that kill thousands of its own citizens. They considered their prior for this hypothetical and judged it overwhelmingly unlikely in comparison to priors such as ‘lots of unlikely-seeming things show up by coincidence once you dig deeply enough’.”
Wording it that way makes it clearer that it is an assumption by the hypothetical characters. Though based on our previous discussions I suspect that it also reflects your assumption and maybe that’s why you failed to clearly distinguish it from the characters’ assumptions in the OP. At least myself and woozle took objection to it. Of course it is also a possibility that we are both reading impaired.