Maybe one should be more hesitant to assign very low probabilities to factors in a conjunction than very high probabilities because the extreme of 100% probability should not be more controversial than omitting a factor.
With a bit of creativity someone could probably come up with dozens of verisimilar additional factor along the lines of “and false vacuum decay hasn’t happened yet.” If we then have to be humble and assign (say) no more than 99% to each of those, it just takes 10 noisy factors to bias the estimate down to ~ 90%.
In this case I went with Nate’s approach and merged the last three factors. None of them seemed silly to me, but I felt like splitting them up didn’t help my intuitions.
Maybe one should be more hesitant to assign very low probabilities to factors in a conjunction than very high probabilities because the extreme of 100% probability should not be more controversial than omitting a factor.
With a bit of creativity someone could probably come up with dozens of verisimilar additional factor along the lines of “and false vacuum decay hasn’t happened yet.” If we then have to be humble and assign (say) no more than 99% to each of those, it just takes 10 noisy factors to bias the estimate down to ~ 90%.
In this case I went with Nate’s approach and merged the last three factors. None of them seemed silly to me, but I felt like splitting them up didn’t help my intuitions.