Put it this way: Of all the things that might have turned out to be controversial, I’m just surprised “we have no idea whether there is life on Mars” turned out to be the one; it still strikes me as fairly obviously reasonable. Oh well, surprises are part of the point of talking to people :-)
The problem may be that “we have no idea whether there is life on Mars” sounds a lot like “we have no evidence about the presence of life on Mars”, which is simply not the case. (Of course, “we have no idea whether there is life on Mars” was operationalized as a probability assessment of 0.5, which does not imply zero evidence, so I can’t be sure if my re-quotation is what you meant.)
Ah, indeed the paraphrased version would be incorrect, and wasn’t what I meant; perhaps I phrased my version badly. I’ve added a clarification to my earlier comment, does that help?
Even if ignorance were total, some kind of Occam’s-Razor prior would be applicable.
Put it this way: Of all the things that might have turned out to be controversial, I’m just surprised “we have no idea whether there is life on Mars” turned out to be the one; it still strikes me as fairly obviously reasonable. Oh well, surprises are part of the point of talking to people :-)
The problem may be that “we have no idea whether there is life on Mars” sounds a lot like “we have no evidence about the presence of life on Mars”, which is simply not the case. (Of course, “we have no idea whether there is life on Mars” was operationalized as a probability assessment of 0.5, which does not imply zero evidence, so I can’t be sure if my re-quotation is what you meant.)
Ah, indeed the paraphrased version would be incorrect, and wasn’t what I meant; perhaps I phrased my version badly. I’ve added a clarification to my earlier comment, does that help?
Yup.