Ghosts are well-attested. God is well-attested. Being well-attested isn’t that strong evidence. But if there’s no particularly good reason to think that it isn’t happening, then it probably happens.
You’re mixing up evidence and priors. God being well-attested is strong evidence, just not nearly strong enough to overcome the vanishingly small prior for such a complex hypothesis.
Given similarly strong evidence for a hypothesis that’s actually plausible, you would probably believe it. If you had never seen a cat before but knew that a large fraction of the population claimed to have one living with them, you probably wouldn’t doubt their existence.
The problem with God is not a low prior. An anthropomorphic god has a very high prior (according to human belief machinery) the thing that sinks it is the extremely strong evidence against it in the form of nearly every aspect of the world looking like it was never touched by anything like intelligent engineering.
nyan_sandwich, you’re really good at delving into the cthonian labyrinths of post-x-rationalist thought, learning something new, and distilling from it an essence potable to merely human minds. It’s to provoke another round of that skill usage that I bring up this tweet:
“Simplicity” refers to a universal prior, not to a coded/compressed language you make out of your past experiences, that’s coding theory.
Any chance of a nyan_sandwich post on the differences between universal priors and optimal codes?
You’re mixing up evidence and priors. God being well-attested is strong evidence, just not nearly strong enough to overcome the vanishingly small prior for such a complex hypothesis.
Given similarly strong evidence for a hypothesis that’s actually plausible, you would probably believe it. If you had never seen a cat before but knew that a large fraction of the population claimed to have one living with them, you probably wouldn’t doubt their existence.
The problem with God is not a low prior. An anthropomorphic god has a very high prior (according to human belief machinery) the thing that sinks it is the extremely strong evidence against it in the form of nearly every aspect of the world looking like it was never touched by anything like intelligent engineering.
nyan_sandwich, you’re really good at delving into the cthonian labyrinths of post-x-rationalist thought, learning something new, and distilling from it an essence potable to merely human minds. It’s to provoke another round of that skill usage that I bring up this tweet:
Any chance of a nyan_sandwich post on the differences between universal priors and optimal codes?
we’ll see. I’d have to develop a thorough understanding and see a need for a post, and decide that writing was a good idea...
I think “physically possible” was supposed to mean the same thing you mean with “actually plausible”.