The quote in that link makes a good point: If one gives you an excuse to be lazy, then you might be privileging the hypothesis; it could be that it was only raised to the level of attention so that you can avoid work. Thus, the lazy choice really does get a big hit to its prior probability for being lazy.
But it’s still false that the other one is probably right. In general, if a human is choosing between two theories, they’re both probably insanely wrong. For rationalists, you can charitably drop “insanely” from that description.
Your first paragraph is a good analysis (enough to merit an upvote of the comment as a whole). Your second seems redundant; I don’t think anyone would interpret the quoted phrase of non-technical English to mean that you should actually raise your estimate of the theory that doesn’t permit laziness relative to other theories not under consideration, and if you have two theories both of which are equally wrong, it doesn’t matter much what you do to differentiate them.
The quote in that link makes a good point: If one gives you an excuse to be lazy, then you might be privileging the hypothesis; it could be that it was only raised to the level of attention so that you can avoid work. Thus, the lazy choice really does get a big hit to its prior probability for being lazy.
But it’s still false that the other one is probably right. In general, if a human is choosing between two theories, they’re both probably insanely wrong. For rationalists, you can charitably drop “insanely” from that description.
Your first paragraph is a good analysis (enough to merit an upvote of the comment as a whole). Your second seems redundant; I don’t think anyone would interpret the quoted phrase of non-technical English to mean that you should actually raise your estimate of the theory that doesn’t permit laziness relative to other theories not under consideration, and if you have two theories both of which are equally wrong, it doesn’t matter much what you do to differentiate them.