I’m using probability to represent personal uncertainty, and I am not a BB. So I think I can legitimately assign the theory a distribution to represent uncertainty, even if believing the theory would make me more uncertain than that. (Note that if we try to include radical logical uncertainty in the distribution, it’s hard to argue the numbers would change. If a uniform distribution “is wrong,” how would I know what I should be assigning high probability to?)
I don’t think you assign a 95% chance to being a BB, or even that you could do so without severe mental illness. Because for starters:
Humans who really believe their actions mean nothing don’t say, “I’ll just pretend that isn’t so.” They stop functioning. Perhaps you meant the bar is literally 5% for meaningful action, and if you thought it was 0.1% you’d stop typing?
I would agree if you’d said that evolution hardwired certain premises or approximate priors into us ‘because it was useful’ to evolution. I do not believe that humans can use the sort of pascalian reasoning you claim to use here, not when the issue is BB or not BB. Nor do I believe it is in any way necessary. (Also, the link doesn’t make this clear, but a true prior would need to include conditional probabilities under all theories being considered. Humans, too, start life with a sketch of conditional probabilities.)
I’m using probability to represent personal uncertainty, and I am not a BB. So I think I can legitimately assign the theory a distribution to represent uncertainty, even if believing the theory would make me more uncertain than that. (Note that if we try to include radical logical uncertainty in the distribution, it’s hard to argue the numbers would change. If a uniform distribution “is wrong,” how would I know what I should be assigning high probability to?)
I don’t think you assign a 95% chance to being a BB, or even that you could do so without severe mental illness. Because for starters:
Humans who really believe their actions mean nothing don’t say, “I’ll just pretend that isn’t so.” They stop functioning. Perhaps you meant the bar is literally 5% for meaningful action, and if you thought it was 0.1% you’d stop typing?
I would agree if you’d said that evolution hardwired certain premises or approximate priors into us ‘because it was useful’ to evolution. I do not believe that humans can use the sort of pascalian reasoning you claim to use here, not when the issue is BB or not BB. Nor do I believe it is in any way necessary. (Also, the link doesn’t make this clear, but a true prior would need to include conditional probabilities under all theories being considered. Humans, too, start life with a sketch of conditional probabilities.)