Someone smart recently argued that there’s no empirical evidence young earth creationists are wrong because all the evidence we have of the Earth’s age is consistent either hypothesis that God created the earth 4000 years ago but designed it to look like it was much older. Is there a good one-page explanation of the core LessWrong idea that your beliefs need to be shifted by evidence even when the evidence isn’t dispositive as versus the standard scientific notion of devastating proof? Right now the idea seems smeared across the Sequences.
Prior probabilities seem to me to be the key idea. Essentially, young earth creationists want P(evidence|hypothesis) = ~1. The problem is that to do this, you have to make P(hypothesis) very small. Essentially, they’re overfitting the data. P(no god) and P(deceitful god) may have identical likelihood functions, but the second one is a conjunction of a lot of statements (god exists, god created the world, god created the world 4000 years ago, god wants people to believe he created the world 4000 years ago, god wants people to believe he created the world 4000 years ago despite evidence to the contrary, etc). All of these statements are an additional decrease in probability for the prior probability in the Bayesian update.
He’s not entirely wrong. Essentially, the more evidence you find of the Earth being more than 4000 years old, the more evidence you have against a non-deceiving god having created it 4000 years ago. If there’s a 0.1% chance that a god will erase all evidence of his existence, then we can only get 20 bits of evidence against him.
The problem is most likely that he’s overestimating the probability of a god being deceitful (conjunction fallacy), and that he’s forgetting that it’s equally impossible to find evidence for such a god (conservation of expected evidence).
If you are trying to explain the fossil, geological, and astronomical record, you might consider two hypotheses:
1) the details reflect the process that put these in place and current physical constants put the time for that to happen based on that record in the billions of years
2) somebody or something “God” for which we have little other evidence other than the world and universe created it all about 4000 years ago and made it look like a billions year project.
In the 2nd case, you take on the additional burden of explaing the existence and physics of God. Explaining why God would want to trick us is probably easier than explaining God’s existence and physics in the first place.
I am reminded of Wg’s statement “Believing you are in a sim is not distinguishable from believing in an omnipotent god (of any type).” Certainly, a sim would have the property that it would be much younger than it appeared to be, that the “history” built in to it would not be consistent with what actually appeared to have happened. Indeed, a sim seems to mean a reality which appears to be one thing but is actually another quite different thing created by powerful consciousnesses that are hiding their existence from us.
Also, supposing that God created the world 6000 years ago or whenever and added a detailed past for artistic verisimilitude (a kinder explanation than the idea that the deep past is a way of tempting people into lack of faith), what would the difference be between God imagining the past in such detail and the past actually having happened?
The difference is that in one situation we are conscious actors learning about our world and in the other we are simulations of meat puppets with experiences that are completely unreliable for indicating something about the world.
Further, if I can be deluded enough to think that dinosaur bones imply dinosaurs and star formation regions imply stars are formed in star formation regions, then God could be deluded, she could be part of a higher level simulation, set up to simulate a God that believed it was omnipotent, omniscient and omnigood.
The difference is in one case we are finite intelligences in a MUCH larger universe, evolving and adapting, with an intelligence that imperfectly but simply reflects reality. In the other case, we aer prisoners in a nightmarish experiment of deception where the rules/physics could be changed at any moment, and in deeply incomprehensible ways by either our God or God’s God.
I suppose the problem of induction means we can never now that the persistence of laws of physics for thousands of miles and hundreds of years implies they will be the same tomorrow. But induction is not just our best bet, it is really our ONLY bet in predicting the future, in a world where we accept a God, predictability is purely at the whim of the programmer (God).
The only sense in whcih there is no difference is the sense in which God decieves us Perfectly.
I may have been imagining a God not obviously worse than the one that (hypothetically) is running this universe—the occasional miracle at most, but with the laws of physics applying almost all the time to almost everything.
Does it make sense to think of people surviving a substantial change in the laws of physics? That’s probably close to one of those “can God defy the laws of logic?” questions.
Does it make sense to think of people surviving a substantial change in the laws of physics? That’s probably close to one of those “can God defy the laws of logic?” questions.
As I understand both God and anybody running a sim, at any point, with the proper programming skills, they can cause essentially ANYTHING to happen. God could blow up the earth with blue heavenly fire, or convert all the Oxygen to Iron or change the Iron in our hemoglobin so it no longer grabbed oxygen for delivery to our cells. To the extent that the God in our universe doesn’t interfere, I am put in mind of “Black Swans,” God is out getting coffee for a few thousand years so we think he is a good guy, but then his coffee break is over, he sees where his sim got 10 billion people with super high tech, and he becomes interested in trimming us back down to biblical proportions. Or who knows what. The point is if these are not the REAL rules of physics, we are at the whim of a god. And indeed the evidence of what “our” benign (for now) God might do is not promising, He seems in the past to have sent clever and annoying plagues, flooded everything, cast us out of Eden, and he has certainly communicated to us the ideas of the end of the world.
It makes sense to think of people surviving a substantial change in the laws of physics if that is what God or the Simulator wants to happen. The essence of being unconstrained by Physics is that it is entirely up to the simulator what happens.
Certainly if you are in a simulated world, and I am controlling the simulation, I can pull the floor out from you instantly, I can transport you not only to any different location instantly, but change the orientation of your body, even how your body feels to you instantly. Indeed, if I am running the sim of you, I can create sensations in you by directly stimulating parts of the sim of your brain which in your real brain would be purely internal. I could make you feel intensely afraid every time you saw yourself in a mirror, I could make you see whatever I wanted as you looked at your hand, I could trigger face recognizers and have you recognizing your mother as you gazed at a robot or a pussy cat or a dinner plate.
Being less intrusive in to your brain, I can make things move in any fashion I choose at any time. I could create a billiards game where balls curved through the air, expanded and contracted, bounced off each other with extra energy, exploded, multiplied on the table, whatever. Your car could speed through the street at 10,000 mph.
I think the only constraint on the sim is temporary, it is what I can make your brain percieve by stimulating its simulated bits wherever I wish. And I can distort your wiring slowly enough so that you had the sensation of continuity but so your simulated nerves appeared to control extra limbs, mechanical objects, whatever. I could grow your intelligence in the sim by expanding the sim of your neocortex, you would feel yourself getting smarter.
I am not constrained to present to you a world which has any internal logic, or even consistent from moment to moment. Object permanence requires a continuity editor, it is easier to make a sim which doesn’t have object permanence for example.
Just what constraints do you think logic imposes that I may have been violating in my comment above?
That’s a good explanation of how to do Solomonoff Induction, but it doesn’t really explain why. Why is a Kolmgorov complexity prior better than any other prior?
Personally, I always argue that if God created the world recently, he specifically designed it to look old; he included light from distant stars, fossils implying evolution, and even created radioactive elements pre-aged. Thus, while technically the Earth may be young, evolution etc. predict what God did with remarkable accuracy, and thus we should use them to make predictions. Furthermore, if God is so determined to deceive us, shouldn’t we do as he wants? :P
Someone smart recently argued that there’s no empirical evidence young earth creationists are wrong because all the evidence we have of the Earth’s age is consistent either hypothesis that God created the earth 4000 years ago but designed it to look like it was much older. Is there a good one-page explanation of the core LessWrong idea that your beliefs need to be shifted by evidence even when the evidence isn’t dispositive as versus the standard scientific notion of devastating proof? Right now the idea seems smeared across the Sequences.
Prior probabilities seem to me to be the key idea. Essentially, young earth creationists want P(evidence|hypothesis) = ~1. The problem is that to do this, you have to make P(hypothesis) very small. Essentially, they’re overfitting the data. P(no god) and P(deceitful god) may have identical likelihood functions, but the second one is a conjunction of a lot of statements (god exists, god created the world, god created the world 4000 years ago, god wants people to believe he created the world 4000 years ago, god wants people to believe he created the world 4000 years ago despite evidence to the contrary, etc). All of these statements are an additional decrease in probability for the prior probability in the Bayesian update.
IIRC the main post about this concept is conservation of expected evidence.
The articles that come to mind are Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, and Rational Evidence and Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences).
He’s not entirely wrong. Essentially, the more evidence you find of the Earth being more than 4000 years old, the more evidence you have against a non-deceiving god having created it 4000 years ago. If there’s a 0.1% chance that a god will erase all evidence of his existence, then we can only get 20 bits of evidence against him.
The problem is most likely that he’s overestimating the probability of a god being deceitful (conjunction fallacy), and that he’s forgetting that it’s equally impossible to find evidence for such a god (conservation of expected evidence).
If you are trying to explain the fossil, geological, and astronomical record, you might consider two hypotheses:
1) the details reflect the process that put these in place and current physical constants put the time for that to happen based on that record in the billions of years
2) somebody or something “God” for which we have little other evidence other than the world and universe created it all about 4000 years ago and made it look like a billions year project.
In the 2nd case, you take on the additional burden of explaing the existence and physics of God. Explaining why God would want to trick us is probably easier than explaining God’s existence and physics in the first place.
I am reminded of Wg’s statement “Believing you are in a sim is not distinguishable from believing in an omnipotent god (of any type).” Certainly, a sim would have the property that it would be much younger than it appeared to be, that the “history” built in to it would not be consistent with what actually appeared to have happened. Indeed, a sim seems to mean a reality which appears to be one thing but is actually another quite different thing created by powerful consciousnesses that are hiding their existence from us.
Also, supposing that God created the world 6000 years ago or whenever and added a detailed past for artistic verisimilitude (a kinder explanation than the idea that the deep past is a way of tempting people into lack of faith), what would the difference be between God imagining the past in such detail and the past actually having happened?
The difference is that in one situation we are conscious actors learning about our world and in the other we are simulations of meat puppets with experiences that are completely unreliable for indicating something about the world.
Further, if I can be deluded enough to think that dinosaur bones imply dinosaurs and star formation regions imply stars are formed in star formation regions, then God could be deluded, she could be part of a higher level simulation, set up to simulate a God that believed it was omnipotent, omniscient and omnigood.
The difference is in one case we are finite intelligences in a MUCH larger universe, evolving and adapting, with an intelligence that imperfectly but simply reflects reality. In the other case, we aer prisoners in a nightmarish experiment of deception where the rules/physics could be changed at any moment, and in deeply incomprehensible ways by either our God or God’s God.
I suppose the problem of induction means we can never now that the persistence of laws of physics for thousands of miles and hundreds of years implies they will be the same tomorrow. But induction is not just our best bet, it is really our ONLY bet in predicting the future, in a world where we accept a God, predictability is purely at the whim of the programmer (God).
The only sense in whcih there is no difference is the sense in which God decieves us Perfectly.
I may have been imagining a God not obviously worse than the one that (hypothetically) is running this universe—the occasional miracle at most, but with the laws of physics applying almost all the time to almost everything.
Does it make sense to think of people surviving a substantial change in the laws of physics? That’s probably close to one of those “can God defy the laws of logic?” questions.
As I understand both God and anybody running a sim, at any point, with the proper programming skills, they can cause essentially ANYTHING to happen. God could blow up the earth with blue heavenly fire, or convert all the Oxygen to Iron or change the Iron in our hemoglobin so it no longer grabbed oxygen for delivery to our cells. To the extent that the God in our universe doesn’t interfere, I am put in mind of “Black Swans,” God is out getting coffee for a few thousand years so we think he is a good guy, but then his coffee break is over, he sees where his sim got 10 billion people with super high tech, and he becomes interested in trimming us back down to biblical proportions. Or who knows what. The point is if these are not the REAL rules of physics, we are at the whim of a god. And indeed the evidence of what “our” benign (for now) God might do is not promising, He seems in the past to have sent clever and annoying plagues, flooded everything, cast us out of Eden, and he has certainly communicated to us the ideas of the end of the world.
It makes sense to think of people surviving a substantial change in the laws of physics if that is what God or the Simulator wants to happen. The essence of being unconstrained by Physics is that it is entirely up to the simulator what happens.
Being unconstrained by physics isn’t the same as being unconstrained by logic.
Certainly if you are in a simulated world, and I am controlling the simulation, I can pull the floor out from you instantly, I can transport you not only to any different location instantly, but change the orientation of your body, even how your body feels to you instantly. Indeed, if I am running the sim of you, I can create sensations in you by directly stimulating parts of the sim of your brain which in your real brain would be purely internal. I could make you feel intensely afraid every time you saw yourself in a mirror, I could make you see whatever I wanted as you looked at your hand, I could trigger face recognizers and have you recognizing your mother as you gazed at a robot or a pussy cat or a dinner plate.
Being less intrusive in to your brain, I can make things move in any fashion I choose at any time. I could create a billiards game where balls curved through the air, expanded and contracted, bounced off each other with extra energy, exploded, multiplied on the table, whatever. Your car could speed through the street at 10,000 mph.
I think the only constraint on the sim is temporary, it is what I can make your brain percieve by stimulating its simulated bits wherever I wish. And I can distort your wiring slowly enough so that you had the sensation of continuity but so your simulated nerves appeared to control extra limbs, mechanical objects, whatever. I could grow your intelligence in the sim by expanding the sim of your neocortex, you would feel yourself getting smarter.
I am not constrained to present to you a world which has any internal logic, or even consistent from moment to moment. Object permanence requires a continuity editor, it is easier to make a sim which doesn’t have object permanence for example.
Just what constraints do you think logic imposes that I may have been violating in my comment above?
That would depend on whether God’s thoughts contain conscious beings, wouldn’t it?
Try this and let me know if it’s what you’re looking for.
That’s a good explanation of how to do Solomonoff Induction, but it doesn’t really explain why. Why is a Kolmgorov complexity prior better than any other prior?
Personally, I always argue that if God created the world recently, he specifically designed it to look old; he included light from distant stars, fossils implying evolution, and even created radioactive elements pre-aged. Thus, while technically the Earth may be young, evolution etc. predict what God did with remarkable accuracy, and thus we should use them to make predictions. Furthermore, if God is so determined to deceive us, shouldn’t we do as he wants? :P