While I can’t say what exactly does or does not count as us being “in a simulation”, there’s also no particular reason I can’t put a probability on it.
Well, I quoted Sleeping Beauty as a particular illustration for why you’d put different probabilities on something depending on what you require, and that must be more specific than “a probability”. This is not a situation where you “can’t have a probability attached”, but illustrates that asking for “a probability” is occasionally not specific enough a question to be meaningful.
I would agree that models are generally useful as ML demonstrates, even if it’s unclear what they are saying, but in such cases interpreting them as hypotheses that give probabilities to events can be misleading, especially when there is no way of extracting these probabilities out of the models, or no clear way of formulating the events we’d be interested in. Instead, you have an error function, and you found models that have low error for the dataset, and these models make things better than the models with greater error. That doesn’t always have to be coerced into the language of probability.
Well, I quoted Sleeping Beauty as a particular illustration for why you’d put different probabilities on something depending on what you require, and that must be more specific than “a probability”. This is not a situation where you “can’t have a probability attached”, but illustrates that asking for “a probability” is occasionally not specific enough a question to be meaningful.
I would agree that models are generally useful as ML demonstrates, even if it’s unclear what they are saying, but in such cases interpreting them as hypotheses that give probabilities to events can be misleading, especially when there is no way of extracting these probabilities out of the models, or no clear way of formulating the events we’d be interested in. Instead, you have an error function, and you found models that have low error for the dataset, and these models make things better than the models with greater error. That doesn’t always have to be coerced into the language of probability.