Imagine a child who grows up being fed very high priors about G1. This child (not a SREoE) is exposed to E1 and has a high confidence in G1. When he (/she) grows up and eventually becomes a SREoE, he first of all consciously throws out all his priors (rebellion against parents), then re-evaluates E1 (re-exposure?) and decides that in fact it entails ~G1.
This was not my experience. I was raised in a practicing religious family, and the existence of the holy texts, the well-being of the members of the religious community, and the existence of the religious community were all strong evidence for G1.
I reduced the probability I assigned to G1 because I realized I was underweighing other evidence. Things I would expect to be true if G1 were true turned out to be false. I think I knew those facts were false, but did not consider the implications, and so didn’t adjust my belief in G1.
Once I considered the implications, it became clear to me that E1 was outweighed by the falsification of other implications of G1. Given that balance, I assign G1 very very low probability of being accurate. But I still don’t deny that E1 is evidence of G1. If I didn’t know E1, learning it would adjust upward my belief in G1.
In practice, what people seem to mean is best described technically as changing what sorts of things count as evidence. I changed my beliefs about G1 because I started taking the state of the world and the prevalence of human suffering as a fact about G1
Also, if we are going to talk coherently about priors, we can’t really describe anything humans do as “throwing out their priors.” If we really assign probability zero to any proposition, we have no way of changing our minds again.. And if we assign some other probability, justifying that is weird.
Certainly you can’t simply will your aliefs to change, but it does seem to be a conscious and deliberate effort around here. The belief in G1 usually happens without any knowledge about Bayesian statistics, technical rationality, or priors, so this “awakening” may be the first time a person ever thought of E1 as “evidence” in this technical sense.
the prevalence of human suffering
By the way, I think the best response to this argument is that yes, there is evil, but God allows it because it is better for us in the long run—in other words, if there is an afterlife which is partly defined by our existence here, than our temporary comfort isn’t the only thing to consider. If we all lived in the Garden of Eden, we would never learn or progress. But I don’t want a whole new argument on my hands.
This was not my experience. I was raised in a practicing religious family, and the existence of the holy texts, the well-being of the members of the religious community, and the existence of the religious community were all strong evidence for G1.
I reduced the probability I assigned to G1 because I realized I was underweighing other evidence. Things I would expect to be true if G1 were true turned out to be false. I think I knew those facts were false, but did not consider the implications, and so didn’t adjust my belief in G1.
Once I considered the implications, it became clear to me that E1 was outweighed by the falsification of other implications of G1. Given that balance, I assign G1 very very low probability of being accurate. But I still don’t deny that E1 is evidence of G1. If I didn’t know E1, learning it would adjust upward my belief in G1.
Also, if we are going to talk coherently about priors, we can’t really describe anything humans do as “throwing out their priors.” If we really assign probability zero to any proposition, we have no way of changing our minds again.. And if we assign some other probability, justifying that is weird.
In practice, what people seem to mean is best described technically as changing what sorts of things count as evidence. I changed my beliefs about G1 because I started taking the state of the world and the prevalence of human suffering as a fact about G1
Certainly you can’t simply will your aliefs to change, but it does seem to be a conscious and deliberate effort around here. The belief in G1 usually happens without any knowledge about Bayesian statistics, technical rationality, or priors, so this “awakening” may be the first time a person ever thought of E1 as “evidence” in this technical sense.
By the way, I think the best response to this argument is that yes, there is evil, but God allows it because it is better for us in the long run—in other words, if there is an afterlife which is partly defined by our existence here, than our temporary comfort isn’t the only thing to consider. If we all lived in the Garden of Eden, we would never learn or progress. But I don’t want a whole new argument on my hands.