I didn’t say I’d think God was involved. I said the deliberately vague, conjunction-fallacy-avoiding phrasing “I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.” That means I’d update P(God spoke to him OR aliens spoke to him OR he’s secretly a genius mathematician and trolling me OR he’s got serious math talent he can’t access consciously OR [more hypotheses I won’t bother generating because this didn’t happen]), with the most likely possibility being that my friend is a genius troll. Then I’d do more experiments.
Ah, yes. I took you to imply you would acknowledge the friend without telling him that he’s probably wrong, or that you’d update disproportionately higher the probability that “God spoke to him in his dream”. i.e. I had assumed an uncharitable interpretation. Doing more experiments on the basis that something interesting happening has suddenly become very likely sounds like a healthy (well, scientifically-healthy) thing to do!
Re. downvote: One single downvote usually doesn’t mean much for posts where I expected karma to remain near 0 anyway. Despite the name and intended purposes of this site, there are still systematic downvoters, karma trolls, generic trolls and biased people around. I’ve noticed (and corrected, hopefully) at least one instance where I was systematically being biased against a certain user and downvoting their comments more frequently than I should. I suspect not everyone is as careful with this.
I didn’t say I’d think God was involved. I said the deliberately vague, conjunction-fallacy-avoiding phrasing “I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.” That means I’d update P(God spoke to him OR aliens spoke to him OR he’s secretly a genius mathematician and trolling me OR he’s got serious math talent he can’t access consciously OR [more hypotheses I won’t bother generating because this didn’t happen]), with the most likely possibility being that my friend is a genius troll. Then I’d do more experiments.
Note: I didn’t downvote you.
Ah, yes. I took you to imply you would acknowledge the friend without telling him that he’s probably wrong, or that you’d update disproportionately higher the probability that “God spoke to him in his dream”. i.e. I had assumed an uncharitable interpretation. Doing more experiments on the basis that something interesting happening has suddenly become very likely sounds like a healthy (well, scientifically-healthy) thing to do!
Re. downvote: One single downvote usually doesn’t mean much for posts where I expected karma to remain near 0 anyway. Despite the name and intended purposes of this site, there are still systematic downvoters, karma trolls, generic trolls and biased people around. I’ve noticed (and corrected, hopefully) at least one instance where I was systematically being biased against a certain user and downvoting their comments more frequently than I should. I suspect not everyone is as careful with this.