It seems like you took a mildly amusing pop culture conjecture (a bit like the dialogue about Madonna at the start of Reservoir Dogs) about a creative way for an alien to circumvent the restriction of always having to tell the truth, and tried to deduce a rationality lesson from this that doesn’t really fit.
I suppose that it could be used as a demonstration of the hidden complexity of a statement like “the odds of this combination are 5000:1 against.”—i.e. that we might fail to notice the assumptions that we would tend to use in parsing this phrase (specifically the assumption that the odds are not taken in reference to an arbitrary criterion like “the cards form a Fibonacci sequence and two pairs of the cards form a suit”, but are defined at the outset with reference to criteria that are relevant to the game of poker like “the cards form a straight”).
On the other hand I don’t see the relevance of minimum message length or whether the dealer is crooked. I mean I don’t follow the logic, at all—it seems like you could discard the second half of the post and it would be much improved. Also, sentences like “In general, this kind of calculation is called a likelihood ratio” are kinda pointless because they provide no new information (and indeed are patronising) to those who have a basic acquaintance with statistics, yet they aren’t helpful to those who haven’t come across the term “likelihood ratio” before because your post doesn’t provide a clear illustration of this concept.
It seems like you took a mildly amusing pop culture conjecture (a bit like the dialogue about Madonna at the start of Reservoir Dogs) about a creative way for an alien to circumvent the restriction of always having to tell the truth, and tried to deduce a rationality lesson from this that doesn’t really fit.
I suppose that it could be used as a demonstration of the hidden complexity of a statement like “the odds of this combination are 5000:1 against.”—i.e. that we might fail to notice the assumptions that we would tend to use in parsing this phrase (specifically the assumption that the odds are not taken in reference to an arbitrary criterion like “the cards form a Fibonacci sequence and two pairs of the cards form a suit”, but are defined at the outset with reference to criteria that are relevant to the game of poker like “the cards form a straight”).
On the other hand I don’t see the relevance of minimum message length or whether the dealer is crooked. I mean I don’t follow the logic, at all—it seems like you could discard the second half of the post and it would be much improved. Also, sentences like “In general, this kind of calculation is called a likelihood ratio” are kinda pointless because they provide no new information (and indeed are patronising) to those who have a basic acquaintance with statistics, yet they aren’t helpful to those who haven’t come across the term “likelihood ratio” before because your post doesn’t provide a clear illustration of this concept.