In general, as all of reality is entangled with itself, it’s pretty rare for something to be precisely zero evidence for any hypothesis—it would indicate that P(H|E)=P(H|~E) which is by itself a very specific point in probability space—it’s much more common for something to be so weak evidence that for all practical purposes a person wouldn’t know how to evaluate impact and/or would be wasting time to attempt to do so...
E.g. “The baby I’m thinking of was born on a rainy day. Is this evidence for or against the baby being named ‘Alex’ ?”.
A really intelligent and informed agent would be able to correlate the average raininess of various regions in the world with the likelihood of the child being named Alex in said region, and thus the raininess would be evidence for the baby’s name...
In that case, the fact that I believe something different than wedrifid is evidence against his point.
Wedrifid’s preferences aren’t literally zero percent evidence for his view of the universe, but they’re probably less than one in a googol. My overall point is pretty clear. The nitpicking is annoying, and it seems to me like it’s being done because people don’t want to change their beliefs.
Your argument doesn’t really make sense. You say that although agents might not know how to evaluate the probability of an action’s occurrence, the evidence is still unlikely to be perfectly balanced. But probabilities are subjective, and so the fact that you don’t know how to evaluate a piece of evidence indicates that for all functional purposes the evidence is perfectly balanced.
Generally agreeing with your point—it is nitpicking. Still it may be good practice to remember to say and think “that’s not usable evidence” instead of “that’s not evidence”.
In general, as all of reality is entangled with itself, it’s pretty rare for something to be precisely zero evidence for any hypothesis—it would indicate that P(H|E)=P(H|~E) which is by itself a very specific point in probability space—it’s much more common for something to be so weak evidence that for all practical purposes a person wouldn’t know how to evaluate impact and/or would be wasting time to attempt to do so...
E.g. “The baby I’m thinking of was born on a rainy day. Is this evidence for or against the baby being named ‘Alex’ ?”. A really intelligent and informed agent would be able to correlate the average raininess of various regions in the world with the likelihood of the child being named Alex in said region, and thus the raininess would be evidence for the baby’s name...
In that case, the fact that I believe something different than wedrifid is evidence against his point.
Wedrifid’s preferences aren’t literally zero percent evidence for his view of the universe, but they’re probably less than one in a googol. My overall point is pretty clear. The nitpicking is annoying, and it seems to me like it’s being done because people don’t want to change their beliefs.
Your argument doesn’t really make sense. You say that although agents might not know how to evaluate the probability of an action’s occurrence, the evidence is still unlikely to be perfectly balanced. But probabilities are subjective, and so the fact that you don’t know how to evaluate a piece of evidence indicates that for all functional purposes the evidence is perfectly balanced.
Generally agreeing with your point—it is nitpicking. Still it may be good practice to remember to say and think “that’s not usable evidence” instead of “that’s not evidence”.