“You can’t travel faster than light” has lots of strong evidence for it, or at any rate it is a very high-probability consequence of a theory which has lots of strong evidence for it. Its not even that extraordinary, it doesn’t contradict anything else we know to be true and it refers to a domain which we have no experience of (travelling at a speed measured in millions of meters per second) so the fact that its non-intuitive shouldn’t be so significant. Compare that with a genuinely extraordinary claim like “homoeopathy works” which is made extraordinary by dint of the fact that if its true we have to throw out the whole of physics, which has plenty of evidence for it.
It doesn’t have as much evidence as “an apple falls down if you drop it” but this fact is irrelevant. Bayesian probability is not a competition, just because we have more evidence for B than for A doesn’t mean we can’t have enough evidence for both of them. The situation would be different if A and B were mutually contradictory, but since they clearly aren’t in this case the fact that one has stronger evidence does not contradict the fact that the other still has strong evidence.
Its simple Bayesian logic, if a claim is extraordinary (meaning implausible/very low prior) then to confirm it you need extraordinary evidence (meaning extraordinarily strong). Any such evidence is unlikely by definition, but it does not have to be weird in the sense of being non-intuitive.
This is the last post I’ll make in this discussion because frankly this argument has become stupid. I seem to recall other discussions with you that went the same way so we obviously bring out the worst in each other.
“You can’t travel faster than light” has lots of strong evidence for it, or at any rate it is a very high-probability consequence of a theory which has lots of strong evidence for it. Its not even that extraordinary, it doesn’t contradict anything else we know to be true and it refers to a domain which we have no experience of (travelling at a speed measured in millions of meters per second) so the fact that its non-intuitive shouldn’t be so significant. Compare that with a genuinely extraordinary claim like “homoeopathy works” which is made extraordinary by dint of the fact that if its true we have to throw out the whole of physics, which has plenty of evidence for it.
It doesn’t have as much evidence as “an apple falls down if you drop it” but this fact is irrelevant. Bayesian probability is not a competition, just because we have more evidence for B than for A doesn’t mean we can’t have enough evidence for both of them. The situation would be different if A and B were mutually contradictory, but since they clearly aren’t in this case the fact that one has stronger evidence does not contradict the fact that the other still has strong evidence.
Its simple Bayesian logic, if a claim is extraordinary (meaning implausible/very low prior) then to confirm it you need extraordinary evidence (meaning extraordinarily strong). Any such evidence is unlikely by definition, but it does not have to be weird in the sense of being non-intuitive.
This is the last post I’ll make in this discussion because frankly this argument has become stupid. I seem to recall other discussions with you that went the same way so we obviously bring out the worst in each other.
If I understand you correctly, extraordinary claims have better evidence on average than more ordinary claims, since they need such.
It is not the case.