There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn’t extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.
If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.
The relevant number to use in the calculation you’re making isn’t the 6 billion people inhabiting the world, but the people that actually claim to have made such a stunning breakthrough: since that’s what instigates us to want to evaluate the claim in the first place, the fact that he made it.
In short not:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X is an alive human being)
but rather:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X claims to have made a stunning breakthrough)
As a rough guess I’d say 1⁄100 (or atleast 1/1000) may be far closer in regards to prior probabilities than 1⁄10,000,000.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren’t popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
Actually, raw order of magnitude it might not be.
There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn’t extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.
If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.
The relevant number to use in the calculation you’re making isn’t the 6 billion people inhabiting the world, but the people that actually claim to have made such a stunning breakthrough: since that’s what instigates us to want to evaluate the claim in the first place, the fact that he made it.
In short not:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X is an alive human being)
but rather:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X claims to have made a stunning breakthrough)
As a rough guess I’d say 1⁄100 (or atleast 1/1000) may be far closer in regards to prior probabilities than 1⁄10,000,000.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren’t popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
OK, that’s a good point.