Planecrash (from Eliezer and Lintamande) seems highly relevant here: the hero, Keltam, tries to determine whether he is in a conspiracy or not. To do that he basically applies Bayes theorem to each new fact he encounters: “Is fact F more likely to happen if I am in a conspiracy or if I am not? hmm, fact F seems more likely to happen if I am not in a conspiracy, let’s update my prior a bit towards the ‘not in a conspiracy’ side”.
Planecrash is a great walkthrough on how to apply that kind of thinking to evaluate whether someone is bullshitting you or not, by keeping two alternative worlds that explain what they are saying, and updating the likelihoods as the discussion goes on.
Surely if you start putting probability on events such as “someone stole my phone”, and “that person then tailed me”, and multiply the probability of each new fact, it gets really unlikely really fast. Also relevant: Burdensome details
Planecrash (from Eliezer and Lintamande) seems highly relevant here: the hero, Keltam, tries to determine whether he is in a conspiracy or not. To do that he basically applies Bayes theorem to each new fact he encounters: “Is fact F more likely to happen if I am in a conspiracy or if I am not? hmm, fact F seems more likely to happen if I am not in a conspiracy, let’s update my prior a bit towards the ‘not in a conspiracy’ side”.
Planecrash is a great walkthrough on how to apply that kind of thinking to evaluate whether someone is bullshitting you or not, by keeping two alternative worlds that explain what they are saying, and updating the likelihoods as the discussion goes on.
Surely if you start putting probability on events such as “someone stole my phone”, and “that person then tailed me”, and multiply the probability of each new fact, it gets really unlikely really fast. Also relevant: Burdensome details