The absurdity heuristic does work well. Almost every possible absurd claim is false. Like most heuristics, it only becomes a problem when you continue using it outside its realm of usefulness.
To demonstrate in this way that the absurdity heuristic is useful, you would have to claim something like:
The ratio of false absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) to true absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) is much higher than the ratio of false non-absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) to true non-absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter).
EDIT wow. I’m the person who wrote that, and i still find it hard to read it. This is one of the reasons why rationality is hard. Even when you have a good intuition for the concepts, it’s still hard to express the ideas in a concrete way.
Aha—I knew this sounded familiar. For those not familiar with it, here it is:
Although you might see people from time to time, they are most likely products of your imagination. Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average population of the Universe is zero, and so the total population must be zero.
The absurdity heuristic does work well. Almost every possible absurd claim is false. Like most heuristics, it only becomes a problem when you continue using it outside its realm of usefulness.
Almost every possible non-absurd claim is also false. I think this is Occam’s Razor, not the absurdity heuristic, in effect and working great.
Exactly!
To demonstrate in this way that the absurdity heuristic is useful, you would have to claim something like:
The ratio of false absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) to true absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) is much higher than the ratio of false non-absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter) to true non-absurd claims (that you are likely to encounter).
EDIT wow. I’m the person who wrote that, and i still find it hard to read it. This is one of the reasons why rationality is hard. Even when you have a good intuition for the concepts, it’s still hard to express the ideas in a concrete way.
“Almost every possible absurd claim is false.”
Ah, I see you have adopted Douglas Adams’ argument which demonstrates that the population of the universe is zero.
Aha—I knew this sounded familiar. For those not familiar with it, here it is:
Retrieved from http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Universe
EDIT: note that this doesn’t work, for several obvious reasons, notably that a subset of an infinite set can be infinite.