Each compartment has its own threshold for evidence.
The post reminded me of Christians talking bravely about there being plenty of evidence for their beliefs. How does that work?
When evidence is abundant we avoid information overload by raising the threshold for what counts as evidence. We have the luxury of taking our decisions on the basis of good quality evidence and the further luxury of dismissing mediocre evidence as not evidence at all.
Evidence is seldom abundant. Usually we work with a middling threshold for evidence, doing the best we can with the mediocre evidence that the middle threshold admits to our councils, and accepting that we will sometimes do the wrong thing due to misleading evidence.
When evidence is scarce we turn our quality threshold down another notch, so we still have evidence, even if it is just a translation of a copy of an old text that is supposed to be eye witness testimony but was written down one hundred years after the event.
I think that the way it works with compartmentalization is that we give each compartment its own threshold. For example, an accountant is doing due diligence work on the prospect for The Plastic Toy Manufacturing Company. It looks like being a good investment, they have an exclusive contract with Disney for movie tie-ins. Look, it says so, right there in the prospectus. Naturally the accountant writes to Disney to confirm this. If Disney do not reply, that is a huge red flag.
On Sunday the accountant goes to Church. They have a prospectus, called the Bible, which makes big claims about their exclusive deal with God. When you pray to God to get confirmation, He ignores you. Awkward!
People have a sense of what it is realistic to expect by way of evidence which varies between the various compartments of their lives. In every compartment their beliefs are comfortably supported by a reasonable quantity and quality of evidence relative to the standard expected for that compartment.
Should we aim at a uniform threshold for evidence across all compartments? That ideas seems too glib. It is good to be more open and trusting in friendship and personal relationships than in business. One will not get far in artistic creation if one doubts ones own talent to the extent of treating it like a dodgy business partner.
Or maybe having a uniform threshold is exactly the right thing to do. That leaves you aware that in important areas of your life you have little evidence and your posteriori distributions have lots of entropy. Then you have to live courageously, trusting friends and lovers despite poor evidence and the risk of betrayal, trusting ones talent and finishing ones novel despite the risk that it is 1000 pages of unpublishable drek.
A uniform threshold is in fact a very bad idea, because different areas legitimately do have a different amount of available evidence. For instance, the threshold in physics is vastly higher than in neurology, even though both are tremendously complicated, because it is much easier to perform the testing in physics, where we can simply set more money to the task (build things such as the LHC, simply to check a few loose ends). If there is limited evidence, we still often have to come to a conclusion, and we need that conclusion to be right.
If talking about certain religious matters, there is virtually no evidence on either side. In fact, it may be that there cannot be a sufficient amount of evidence to determine its, no matter what threshold we set. I believe that this is true, which is why I am strongly agnostic.
In many ways, this is similar to being an atheist, (I definitely do not believe in any specific god or religion), but strong atheism requires even more faith than being religious. An omnipotent being is not a logical contradiction, while being capable of causing any kind of results to your testing, and thus there is absolutely no way to prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent being. It is perhaps possible to disprove that the omnipotent being does certain kinds of things regularly, but then the apologetics have the right to point out why your formulation doesn’t apply to their god. At least the religious tend to admit the lack of evidence, and that they go by their faith.
… Um, the default assumption is that any given hypothesis is wrong, you can’t get your priors to converge otherwise. Omnipotent intelligent beings are sufficiently complex that I’d need a few megabits in their favor before I gave them parity with physics.
Um, the default assumption is that any given hypothesis is wrong, you can’t get your priors to converge otherwise. Omnipotent intelligent beings are sufficiently complex that I’d need a few megabits in their favor before I gave them parity with physics.
This given hypothesis is wrong. A megabit means a 2^1,000,000+ odds ratio.
If you can specify physics with n bits, and pick out a narrow class of humans or computers or books with ~k bits, and humans can produce an algorithmic description of a world with an omnigod, then you can specify the omnigod with ~n+k bits.
I don’t think it takes a megabit to specify a world like Permutation City for an intelligence to be essentially omnipotent in. Specifying intelligence along the lines of AIXI with unbounded computation requires few bits.
Point. I was thinking in terms of “this particular intelligence,” and whatever an AGI looks like I will happily offer 999:1 odds it will take more than a megabit of disc space. But if you just want “an intelligence,” yeah, not nearly as much.
… Still would need an awful lot to compete with physics, though.
To clarify: This is because any given hypothesis has a prior proportional to 2^-(complexity), which for any reasonable hypothesis means ludicrously low odds of being true.
Then you update on evidence, and just seeing things gives you megabits to work with, so that goes up significantly for particular hypotheses, but… the point is, even aside from evidence something like “God exists” is starting at a massive penalty compared to physics.
No, that is not the default way to handle a hypothesis. The default is to ask: why should I believe this? If they have reasons, you look into it, assuming you care. If the reasons are false, expound upon that. If they are not false, you cannot simply claim that, since the proof is insufficient, it is false.
The point of my argument was that there was very little evidence either way. I implied that truth of the hypothesis would have no certain effect upon the world. Thus it is untestable, and completely unrelated to science. Therefore, any statement that it is false needs either a logical proof (all possible worlds), or to go on faith.
The physics analogy was on the other subject, of where we set the thresholds. In this case, even if we set them very low, we can say nothing. Your response makes more sense to the question of whether it is a belief you should personally adopt, not whether it is true or not.
Side Note: A few megabits? Really? You think you are that close to infallible? I know I’m not, even on logical certainties.
If they are not false, you cannot simply claim that, since the proof is insufficient, it is false.
Um, yes you can, or you end up being stuck believing any random “insufficient disproof” hypothesis. I’ll name a few, if you want: there’s an invisible intangible unicorn in your room, your boss is being mind-controlled by space aliens through subspace, and your door is wired to explode but only when you would be in a position to be killed by it.
If you give any of these meaningful credence—even enough to be “agnostic” about it—then you shouldn’t ever use that door, might consider quitting your job, and will work under the assumption that you never have privacy
And no, I don’t think I’m that close to infallible, I think I’d have to be that close to infallible to believe something that ridiculous.
In many ways, this is similar to being an atheist, (I definitely do not believe in any specific god or religion), but strong atheism requires even more faith than being religious. An omnipotent being is not a logical contradiction, while being capable of causing any kind of results to your testing, and thus there is absolutely no way to prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent being.
If there’s no way to prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent being, this is the most egregious example of a belief not paying rent.
This is the same reasoning that one should give for not outright rejecting the hypothesis that the universe was created last Thursday, with all of our memories of everything beyond last Thursday being a fabrication. There’s no way to prove it wrong, so by your logic you can’t reject it outright.
Each compartment has its own threshold for evidence.
The post reminded me of Christians talking bravely about there being plenty of evidence for their beliefs. How does that work?
When evidence is abundant we avoid information overload by raising the threshold for what counts as evidence. We have the luxury of taking our decisions on the basis of good quality evidence and the further luxury of dismissing mediocre evidence as not evidence at all.
Evidence is seldom abundant. Usually we work with a middling threshold for evidence, doing the best we can with the mediocre evidence that the middle threshold admits to our councils, and accepting that we will sometimes do the wrong thing due to misleading evidence.
When evidence is scarce we turn our quality threshold down another notch, so we still have evidence, even if it is just a translation of a copy of an old text that is supposed to be eye witness testimony but was written down one hundred years after the event.
I think that the way it works with compartmentalization is that we give each compartment its own threshold. For example, an accountant is doing due diligence work on the prospect for The Plastic Toy Manufacturing Company. It looks like being a good investment, they have an exclusive contract with Disney for movie tie-ins. Look, it says so, right there in the prospectus. Naturally the accountant writes to Disney to confirm this. If Disney do not reply, that is a huge red flag.
On Sunday the accountant goes to Church. They have a prospectus, called the Bible, which makes big claims about their exclusive deal with God. When you pray to God to get confirmation, He ignores you. Awkward!
People have a sense of what it is realistic to expect by way of evidence which varies between the various compartments of their lives. In every compartment their beliefs are comfortably supported by a reasonable quantity and quality of evidence relative to the standard expected for that compartment.
Should we aim at a uniform threshold for evidence across all compartments? That ideas seems too glib. It is good to be more open and trusting in friendship and personal relationships than in business. One will not get far in artistic creation if one doubts ones own talent to the extent of treating it like a dodgy business partner.
Or maybe having a uniform threshold is exactly the right thing to do. That leaves you aware that in important areas of your life you have little evidence and your posteriori distributions have lots of entropy. Then you have to live courageously, trusting friends and lovers despite poor evidence and the risk of betrayal, trusting ones talent and finishing ones novel despite the risk that it is 1000 pages of unpublishable drek.
A uniform threshold is in fact a very bad idea, because different areas legitimately do have a different amount of available evidence. For instance, the threshold in physics is vastly higher than in neurology, even though both are tremendously complicated, because it is much easier to perform the testing in physics, where we can simply set more money to the task (build things such as the LHC, simply to check a few loose ends). If there is limited evidence, we still often have to come to a conclusion, and we need that conclusion to be right.
If talking about certain religious matters, there is virtually no evidence on either side. In fact, it may be that there cannot be a sufficient amount of evidence to determine its, no matter what threshold we set. I believe that this is true, which is why I am strongly agnostic.
In many ways, this is similar to being an atheist, (I definitely do not believe in any specific god or religion), but strong atheism requires even more faith than being religious. An omnipotent being is not a logical contradiction, while being capable of causing any kind of results to your testing, and thus there is absolutely no way to prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent being. It is perhaps possible to disprove that the omnipotent being does certain kinds of things regularly, but then the apologetics have the right to point out why your formulation doesn’t apply to their god. At least the religious tend to admit the lack of evidence, and that they go by their faith.
… Um, the default assumption is that any given hypothesis is wrong, you can’t get your priors to converge otherwise. Omnipotent intelligent beings are sufficiently complex that I’d need a few megabits in their favor before I gave them parity with physics.
This given hypothesis is wrong. A megabit means a 2^1,000,000+ odds ratio.
If you can specify physics with n bits, and pick out a narrow class of humans or computers or books with ~k bits, and humans can produce an algorithmic description of a world with an omnigod, then you can specify the omnigod with ~n+k bits.
I don’t think it takes a megabit to specify a world like Permutation City for an intelligence to be essentially omnipotent in. Specifying intelligence along the lines of AIXI with unbounded computation requires few bits.
Point. I was thinking in terms of “this particular intelligence,” and whatever an AGI looks like I will happily offer 999:1 odds it will take more than a megabit of disc space. But if you just want “an intelligence,” yeah, not nearly as much.
… Still would need an awful lot to compete with physics, though.
To clarify: This is because any given hypothesis has a prior proportional to 2^-(complexity), which for any reasonable hypothesis means ludicrously low odds of being true.
Then you update on evidence, and just seeing things gives you megabits to work with, so that goes up significantly for particular hypotheses, but… the point is, even aside from evidence something like “God exists” is starting at a massive penalty compared to physics.
No, that is not the default way to handle a hypothesis. The default is to ask: why should I believe this? If they have reasons, you look into it, assuming you care. If the reasons are false, expound upon that. If they are not false, you cannot simply claim that, since the proof is insufficient, it is false.
The point of my argument was that there was very little evidence either way. I implied that truth of the hypothesis would have no certain effect upon the world. Thus it is untestable, and completely unrelated to science. Therefore, any statement that it is false needs either a logical proof (all possible worlds), or to go on faith.
The physics analogy was on the other subject, of where we set the thresholds. In this case, even if we set them very low, we can say nothing. Your response makes more sense to the question of whether it is a belief you should personally adopt, not whether it is true or not.
Side Note: A few megabits? Really? You think you are that close to infallible? I know I’m not, even on logical certainties.
Um, yes you can, or you end up being stuck believing any random “insufficient disproof” hypothesis. I’ll name a few, if you want: there’s an invisible intangible unicorn in your room, your boss is being mind-controlled by space aliens through subspace, and your door is wired to explode but only when you would be in a position to be killed by it.
If you give any of these meaningful credence—even enough to be “agnostic” about it—then you shouldn’t ever use that door, might consider quitting your job, and will work under the assumption that you never have privacy
And no, I don’t think I’m that close to infallible, I think I’d have to be that close to infallible to believe something that ridiculous.
If there’s no way to prove the nonexistence of an omnipotent being, this is the most egregious example of a belief not paying rent.
This is the same reasoning that one should give for not outright rejecting the hypothesis that the universe was created last Thursday, with all of our memories of everything beyond last Thursday being a fabrication. There’s no way to prove it wrong, so by your logic you can’t reject it outright.