I’m not disputing your point vs cryonics, but 0.5 will only rarely be the best possible estimate for the probability of X.
It’s not possible to think about a statement about which literally nothing is known (in the sense of information potentially available to you). At the very least you either know how you became aware of X or that X suddenly came to your mind without any apparent reason. If you can understand X you will know how complex X is. If you don’t you will at least know that and can guess at the complexity based on the information density you expect for such a statement and its length.
Example: If you hear someone whom you don’t specifically suspect to have a reason to make it up say that Joachim Korchinsky will marry Abigail Medeiros on August 24 that statement probably should be assigned a probability quite a bit higher than 0.5 even if you don’t know anything about the people involved. If you generate the same statement yourself by picking names and a date at random you probably should assign a probability very close to 0.
Basically it comes down to this: Most possible positive statements that carry more than one bit of information are false, but most methods of encountering statements are biased towards true statements.
I wonder what the average probability of truth is for every spoken statement made by the human populace on your average day, for various message lengths. Anybody wanna try some Fermi calculations?
I’m guessing it’s rather high, as most statements are trivial observations about sensory data, performative utterances, or first-glance approximations of one’s preferences. I would also predict sentence accuracy drops off extremely quickly the more words the sentence has, and especially so the more syllables there are per word in that sentence.
Once you are beyond the most elementary of statements I really don’t think so, rather the opposite, at least for unique rather than for repeated statements. Most untrue statements are probably either ad hoc lies (“You look great.” “That’s a great gift.” “I don’t have any money with me.”) or misremembered information.
In the case of of ad hoc lies there is not enough time to invent plausible details and inventing details without time to think it through increases the risk of being caught, in the case of misremembered information you are less likely to know or remember additional information you could include in the statement than someone who really knows the subject and wouldn’t make that error. Of course more information simply means including more things even the best experts on the subject are simply wrong about as well as more room for misrememberings, but I think the first effect dominates because there are many subjects the second effect doesn’t really apply to, e. g. the content of a work of fiction or the constitution of a state (to an extent even legal matters in general).
Complex untrue statements would be things like rehearsed lies and anecdotes/myths/urban legends.
Consider the so called conjunction fallacy, if it was maladaptive for evaluating the truth of statements encountered normally it probably wouldn’t exist. So in every day conversation (or at least the sort of situations that are relevant for the propagation of the memes and or genes involved) complex statements, at least of those kinds that can be observed to be evaluated “fallaciously”, are probably more likely to be true.
I’m not disputing your point vs cryonics, but 0.5 will only rarely be the best possible estimate for the probability of X. It’s not possible to think about a statement about which literally nothing is known (in the sense of information potentially available to you). At the very least you either know how you became aware of X or that X suddenly came to your mind without any apparent reason. If you can understand X you will know how complex X is. If you don’t you will at least know that and can guess at the complexity based on the information density you expect for such a statement and its length.
Example: If you hear someone whom you don’t specifically suspect to have a reason to make it up say that Joachim Korchinsky will marry Abigail Medeiros on August 24 that statement probably should be assigned a probability quite a bit higher than 0.5 even if you don’t know anything about the people involved. If you generate the same statement yourself by picking names and a date at random you probably should assign a probability very close to 0.
Basically it comes down to this: Most possible positive statements that carry more than one bit of information are false, but most methods of encountering statements are biased towards true statements.
I wonder what the average probability of truth is for every spoken statement made by the human populace on your average day, for various message lengths. Anybody wanna try some Fermi calculations?
I’m guessing it’s rather high, as most statements are trivial observations about sensory data, performative utterances, or first-glance approximations of one’s preferences. I would also predict sentence accuracy drops off extremely quickly the more words the sentence has, and especially so the more syllables there are per word in that sentence.
Once you are beyond the most elementary of statements I really don’t think so, rather the opposite, at least for unique rather than for repeated statements. Most untrue statements are probably either ad hoc lies (“You look great.” “That’s a great gift.” “I don’t have any money with me.”) or misremembered information.
In the case of of ad hoc lies there is not enough time to invent plausible details and inventing details without time to think it through increases the risk of being caught, in the case of misremembered information you are less likely to know or remember additional information you could include in the statement than someone who really knows the subject and wouldn’t make that error. Of course more information simply means including more things even the best experts on the subject are simply wrong about as well as more room for misrememberings, but I think the first effect dominates because there are many subjects the second effect doesn’t really apply to, e. g. the content of a work of fiction or the constitution of a state (to an extent even legal matters in general).
Complex untrue statements would be things like rehearsed lies and anecdotes/myths/urban legends.
Consider the so called conjunction fallacy, if it was maladaptive for evaluating the truth of statements encountered normally it probably wouldn’t exist. So in every day conversation (or at least the sort of situations that are relevant for the propagation of the memes and or genes involved) complex statements, at least of those kinds that can be observed to be evaluated “fallaciously”, are probably more likely to be true.