So the one we know the most about gets the heavier cumulative weight, because it has more sub-classes in our reasoning, because we know the most about it.
I suspect that without a solid base case, this process of over-weighting familiar options could be weaponized to form an argument against pursuing novel ideas about familiar topics. If I have “no clue” about, say, how a new model of the universe would compare to the old models, I could split “possibilities from old models” into so many fragments that the probability of the new model, weighted equally to all the tiny slivers of the familiar old model, approaches 0.
It seems like preventing this may require that the things being compared seem of similar size, but if you can guess the size of something, you’re no longer entirely clueless about it.
It seems like the problem might be in the assumption of having “no clue”. I think someone truly clueless about a question would be unable to divide it into parts in order to compare the parts’ probabilities. I imagine being asked an advanced question about the grammar or meaning of a passage in a language that I can neither speak nor read, and I would be unable to even formulate a question to assign probabilities to.
So the one we know the most about gets the heavier cumulative weight, because it has more sub-classes in our reasoning, because we know the most about it.
I suspect that without a solid base case, this process of over-weighting familiar options could be weaponized to form an argument against pursuing novel ideas about familiar topics. If I have “no clue” about, say, how a new model of the universe would compare to the old models, I could split “possibilities from old models” into so many fragments that the probability of the new model, weighted equally to all the tiny slivers of the familiar old model, approaches 0.
It seems like preventing this may require that the things being compared seem of similar size, but if you can guess the size of something, you’re no longer entirely clueless about it.
It seems like the problem might be in the assumption of having “no clue”. I think someone truly clueless about a question would be unable to divide it into parts in order to compare the parts’ probabilities. I imagine being asked an advanced question about the grammar or meaning of a passage in a language that I can neither speak nor read, and I would be unable to even formulate a question to assign probabilities to.