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Comment by eeperson | Hacker News Reader

>It is a made up number. So what? It's not made up out of thin air though.

Wait what?

Yes you can assign a probability to everything, it doesn't necessarily mean anything, but you can do it. I hope that is not how you prove all of your math problems.

I'm sorry I must not have been clear in my previous post. I did not mean that you personally were moving the goalposts. I meant that your hypothetical person who believed in garage dragons was moving the goalposts. I was trying to argue that your analogy was a straw man argument.

Also, your argument that 'religion has moved the goalposts' Would be an example of an association fallacy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

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You are completely missing the point of the Bayesian interpretation of probability and I'm not really sure how to explain it any better.

Let's say you have to bet money on whether or not P=NP will be proven next year. You get to choose the odds you are willing to take it at, and you want to do it so that you will win the most amount of money on average. The on average is the important part.

So if you say you are 99% sure that it won't, that merely means you would make a bet where you will pay $1 if it doesn't happen, and get $100 if it does. If you made a hundred such bets and lost only 1% of the time, you would walk away with just as much money as you started with.

The point of the thought experiment is you don't get the luxury of saying "I don't know", you have to actually make a decision of how certain you are. And you can't take 10 years to calculate how certain you are mathematically either, you have to make a decision. And it's all probabilistic. You decide what bet to take based on how likely you think it is to happen. This is how we make most our decisions. We couldn't go about our daily lives if we didn't do this.

I don't think it's an association fallacy. I am not saying "All claims religions made in the past turned out to be false when tested, therefore all religious claims are guaranteed to be false." I was just trying to point out the history of religions removing more and more of the actual testable claims. Because the testable claims are all that's left, since everything else has long since been proven to be false.

It sounds like we are talking past each other slightly. It sounds like you are trying to produce the probability that a proof is found that P=NP in a given year. However, I'm asking for the probability that ultimately P=NP. What would you average that over? What would your input data be?

I understand that people work up all sorts of heuristics for their daily lives, but that doesn't constitute scientific proof. There still just heuristics.

> Because the testable claims are all that's left, since everything else has long since been proven to be false

How can testable claims be all that's left. If it's testable then it can be proven or disproven. Did you mean untestable?

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