From: Randall Randall (randall@randallsquared.com)
Date: Wed Jul 07 2004 - 12:15:42 MDT
On Jul 7, 2004, at 12:15 PM, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>> I'll bite. How does the non-sim hypothesis predict our world more
>> strongly than the sim hypothesis?
> If the sim hypothesis is compatible to some degree with such things as
> psychic powers, divine intervention, giant killer aardvarks, and many
> other things which we have not in fact observed, then that
> *compatibility* - that predictive probability mass - must have been
> diverted from other possibilities. The sim hypothesis is compatible
> with many more possible observations than the non-sim hypothesis, so
> the non-hypothesis must predict our own world more strongly.
Doesn't this presuppose knowledge about what a
non-sim world would contain? That is, could it
not be the case that the non-sim world contains
psychic powers and divine intervention, and that
this world is a sim without them?
I'm not sure that probability can help with
this, since you have to have a prior about the
distribution of cases, or examples of more than
one case to reason about it probabilistically.
Or, alternatively, I just don't get it. :)
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> Property law should use #'EQ , not #'EQUAL .
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