True, that was a strange word. I may have been spending too much time thinking about large numbers lately. My point is that it’s not literally unreachable the way a Levin-prior penalty on running speed makes quantum mechanics (in all forms) absolutely implausible relative to any amount of evidence you can possibly collect, or the Hansonian penalty makes ever being in a position to influence 3^^^3 future lives “absolutely implausible” relative to any amount of info you can collect in less than log(3^^^3) time, given that your sensory bandwidth is on the order of a few megabits per second.
As soon as you start trying to be “reasonable” or “skeptical” or “outside view” or whatever about the likelihood ratios involved in the evidence, obviously 10^-50 instantly goes to an eternally unreachable prior penalty since after all over the course of the human species people have completely hallucinated more unlikely things due to insanity on far fewer than 10^50 tries, etcetera. That’s part of what I was trying to get at with (2). But if you’re saying that, then it’s also quite probable that the Hansonian adjustment is inappropriate or that you otherwise screwed up the calculation of 10^-50 prior probability, and that it is actually more. It is sometimes useful to be clever about adjustments, it is sometimes useful to at least look at the unadjusted utilities to see what the sheer numbers would say if taken at face value, and it is never useful to be clever about adjusting only one side of the equation while taking the other at face value.
True, that was a strange word. I may have been spending too much time thinking about large numbers lately. My point is that it’s not literally unreachable the way a Levin-prior penalty on running speed makes quantum mechanics (in all forms) absolutely implausible relative to any amount of evidence you can possibly collect, or the Hansonian penalty makes ever being in a position to influence 3^^^3 future lives “absolutely implausible” relative to any amount of info you can collect in less than log(3^^^3) time, given that your sensory bandwidth is on the order of a few megabits per second.
As soon as you start trying to be “reasonable” or “skeptical” or “outside view” or whatever about the likelihood ratios involved in the evidence, obviously 10^-50 instantly goes to an eternally unreachable prior penalty since after all over the course of the human species people have completely hallucinated more unlikely things due to insanity on far fewer than 10^50 tries, etcetera. That’s part of what I was trying to get at with (2). But if you’re saying that, then it’s also quite probable that the Hansonian adjustment is inappropriate or that you otherwise screwed up the calculation of 10^-50 prior probability, and that it is actually more. It is sometimes useful to be clever about adjustments, it is sometimes useful to at least look at the unadjusted utilities to see what the sheer numbers would say if taken at face value, and it is never useful to be clever about adjusting only one side of the equation while taking the other at face value.