Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

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People are lazy when they speak, it's best to understand basically every claim as probabilistic (and meaning "almost certainly") even when it isn't stated as such.

Certainly no-one would make the claim that "there are (definitely) no aliens in the galaxy" when we can't disprove the idea that aliens traveling at the speed of light just reached the galaxy (with our current understanding of physics). That doesn't mean you can't make the claim "there are (almost definitely) no aliens in the galaxy (because I just created the most amazing telescope ever and looked at every particle of matter in the galaxy and there were no aliens there)". The principle of charity demands that understand the bare claim that "there are no aliens in the galaxy" to mean something that is plausible, such as "there are almost certainly no aliens in the galaxy".

A line of reasoning that tells our turtles something totally false doesn't deserve validation for doing it with slight uncertainty.

You have to weight the validity of the reasoning across all turtle observers through history. If you reject probabilistic reasoning because it sometimes tell you things that are wrong, then you have no way to reason about uncertainty.

If your reasoning about uncertainty tells you there's a 99% chance something is false while it's true, what good is it? All the math in the world won't save you from the specious premises in this no-seafarers argument.

"If your reasoning suggests you shouldn't play the lottery, but playing the lottery actually results in you winning, what use is your math?"

Well, what matters is expectation. The fact that some people win the lottery doesn't prove that playing the lotto is profitable. In fact it isn't money-profitable. The fact that people sometimes win doesn't change the nature of reality, that even for them, the win is unexpected and playing was negative expectation for them.

You seem to be confusing expected value with results.

Do you revise your decision process every time you get unlucky? On a meta level, sure, paying attention to unexpected failures is important to look for systematic errors. But randomly getting unlucky on 99% certainties does not automatically disprove your decision method.

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