I assign at least ten times as much probability New York as I do Moscow.
What does this mean, could you unpack?
It wasn’t my choice of phrase:
just as you won’t compare probability of Moscow with probability of New York
When reading statements like that that are not expressed with mathematical formality the appropriate response seems to be resolving to the meaning that fits best or asking for more specificity. Saying you just can’t do the comparison seems to a wrong answer when you can but there is difficulty resolving ambiguity. For example you say “the answer to A is Y but you technically could have meant B instead of A in which case the answer is Z”.
I actually originally included the ‘what does probability of Moscow mean?’ tangent in the reply but cut it out because it was spammy and actually fit better as a response to the nearby context.
These are not probabilities of the cities themselves. I expect you’d agree and say that of course that doesn’t make sense, but that’s just my point.
Based on the link from the decision theory thread I actually thought you were making a deeper point than that and I was trying to clear a distraction-in-the-details out of the way.
The point I was making is that people do discuss probabilities of different worlds that are not seen as possibilities for some single world. And comparing probabilities of different worlds in themselves seems to be an error for basically the same reason as comparing probabilities of two cities in themselves is an error. I think this is an important error, and realizing it makes a lot of ideas about reasoning in the context of multiple worlds clearly wrong.
It wasn’t my choice of phrase:
When reading statements like that that are not expressed with mathematical formality the appropriate response seems to be resolving to the meaning that fits best or asking for more specificity. Saying you just can’t do the comparison seems to a wrong answer when you can but there is difficulty resolving ambiguity. For example you say “the answer to A is Y but you technically could have meant B instead of A in which case the answer is Z”.
I actually originally included the ‘what does probability of Moscow mean?’ tangent in the reply but cut it out because it was spammy and actually fit better as a response to the nearby context.
Based on the link from the decision theory thread I actually thought you were making a deeper point than that and I was trying to clear a distraction-in-the-details out of the way.
The point I was making is that people do discuss probabilities of different worlds that are not seen as possibilities for some single world. And comparing probabilities of different worlds in themselves seems to be an error for basically the same reason as comparing probabilities of two cities in themselves is an error. I think this is an important error, and realizing it makes a lot of ideas about reasoning in the context of multiple worlds clearly wrong.