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It's always seemed dubious to me that people try to make probabilistic statements about an event that we only have one sample of, and whose causes we can only s
by _bxg1 7y ago
It's always seemed dubious to me that people try to make probabilistic statements about an event that we only have one sample of, and whose causes we can only speculate about
- alexpetralia 7y agoExactly - probability (and by extension, statements such as "more likely") only make sense when we have a reference class of similar events for which we have iterated trials (frequentism), or iterated trials we can reasonably hypothesize about (hypothetical frequentism). Statistics and probability was not designed for one-off events with specious reference classes. The more speculative the reference class, the more we should doubt any claim of "more likely". In the case of the Boltzmann brain, given we have no evidence of this ever occurring thus far, we can at very least claim it does not have a clear reference class that we can identify empirically.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jbay808 7y agoExactly -- with such little data, we should only be making definite, absolute statements rather than vague probabilistic guesses.
- russdill 7y agoThis is somewhat similar to the serial number problem, where a small sample of observed serial numbers is used to deduce the size of production.