I need more help than that. Can you expand “the hypothesis gives an explicit way to construct a predictor that satisfies it” in case hypothesis = Islam?
I don’t know whether we can construct a predictor that satisfies Islam. What sensory inputs are consistent with the existence of Allah? Muslims would claim that their sensory inputs are just fine… So the question with Islam is difficult and I don’t feel I’ve solved it yet. All I know is that the argument from complexity (“burdensome details”) certainly fails because it just assigns a credence based on hypothesis length, which can’t work in general.
I asked a harder question than I meant to, because I don’t know what’s going on. Tell me what a “predictor that satisfies X” is. If X = Islam is too hard, tell me for an X contrived so as to make saying so easy.
Edit: Perplexed called me disingenuous yesterday, maybe for questions like these? But I am serious.
Imagine you’re debugging a program that crashes. Your friend Bob is smarter than you and has already figured it out, so for any input data he can tell you in advance whether it will crash or not. You formulate a hypothesis: “the crash happens within this function”. It does not yet allow you to predict crashes accurately, because there’s a variety of things that could go wrong within this particular function. Now you tell Bob, “I think it crashes somewhere in this function”, and Bob nods, “Yeah”. This means Bob belongs to the subset of possible predictors that satisfy your hypothesis :-)
But what predictions Bob should make to satisfy Islam seems to be a more difficult question.
Edit: I don’t think you’re disingenuous. Asking the right questions can help all participants achieve clarity where there was none. It’s an art that I’m slowly learning here on LW—most of the results in my posts come out of discussions.
I need more help than that. Can you expand “the hypothesis gives an explicit way to construct a predictor that satisfies it” in case hypothesis = Islam?
I don’t know whether we can construct a predictor that satisfies Islam. What sensory inputs are consistent with the existence of Allah? Muslims would claim that their sensory inputs are just fine… So the question with Islam is difficult and I don’t feel I’ve solved it yet. All I know is that the argument from complexity (“burdensome details”) certainly fails because it just assigns a credence based on hypothesis length, which can’t work in general.
I asked a harder question than I meant to, because I don’t know what’s going on. Tell me what a “predictor that satisfies X” is. If X = Islam is too hard, tell me for an X contrived so as to make saying so easy.
Edit: Perplexed called me disingenuous yesterday, maybe for questions like these? But I am serious.
Imagine you’re debugging a program that crashes. Your friend Bob is smarter than you and has already figured it out, so for any input data he can tell you in advance whether it will crash or not. You formulate a hypothesis: “the crash happens within this function”. It does not yet allow you to predict crashes accurately, because there’s a variety of things that could go wrong within this particular function. Now you tell Bob, “I think it crashes somewhere in this function”, and Bob nods, “Yeah”. This means Bob belongs to the subset of possible predictors that satisfy your hypothesis :-)
But what predictions Bob should make to satisfy Islam seems to be a more difficult question.
Edit: I don’t think you’re disingenuous. Asking the right questions can help all participants achieve clarity where there was none. It’s an art that I’m slowly learning here on LW—most of the results in my posts come out of discussions.
Sorry for deleting my comment. I noticed it was wrong before I saw your reply...