Your comment made me realise that I skipped over the objection that the questions are too ambiguous to be worth engaging with. I’ve now added a paragraph to fix that:
To me, and presumably most LessWrong readers, the most obvious response to these questions is to dissolve them, or to at least try to pin the questioner down on definitions. And I do think that’s very reasonable. But in this post I want to put my (current) belief that “we can always assign probabilities to propositions (or at least use something like an uninformative prior)” to a particularly challenging test, so from here on I’ll assume we’ve somehow arrived at a satisfactorily precise understanding of what the question is actually meant to mean.
I think the reason why I initially skipped over that without noticing I’d done so was that:
this post was essentially prompted by the post from Chris Smith with the “Kyle the atheist” example
Smith writes in a footnote “For the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume everyone you ask is intelligent, has a decent understanding of probability, and more or less agrees about what constitutes an all-powerful god.”
I wanted to explore whether the idea of it always being possible to assign probabilities could stand up to that particularly challenging case, without us having to lean on the (very reasonable) strategy of debating the meaning of the question. I.e., I wanted to see if, if we did agree of the definitions, we could still come to meaningful probabilities on that sort of question (and if so, how).
But I realise now that it might seem weird to readers that I neglected to mention the ambiguity of the questions, so I’m glad your comment brought that to my attention.
Your comment made me realise that I skipped over the objection that the questions are too ambiguous to be worth engaging with. I’ve now added a paragraph to fix that:
I think the reason why I initially skipped over that without noticing I’d done so was that:
this post was essentially prompted by the post from Chris Smith with the “Kyle the atheist” example
Smith writes in a footnote “For the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume everyone you ask is intelligent, has a decent understanding of probability, and more or less agrees about what constitutes an all-powerful god.”
I wanted to explore whether the idea of it always being possible to assign probabilities could stand up to that particularly challenging case, without us having to lean on the (very reasonable) strategy of debating the meaning of the question. I.e., I wanted to see if, if we did agree of the definitions, we could still come to meaningful probabilities on that sort of question (and if so, how).
But I realise now that it might seem weird to readers that I neglected to mention the ambiguity of the questions, so I’m glad your comment brought that to my attention.