From another essay by Scott Alexander: > Suppose you have a target that is half red and half blue; you are aiming for red. You would have to be very very confi

From another essay by Scott Alexander: > Suppose you have a target that is half red and half blue; you are aiming for red. You would have to be very very confident in your dart skills to say there is only a one in a million chance you will miss it. But if there is a target that is 999,999 millionths red, and 1 millionth blue, then you do not have to be at all good at darts to say confidently that there is only a one in a million chance you will miss the red area. > Suppose a Christian says “Jesus might be God. And he might not be God. 50-50 chance. So you would have to be incredibly overconfident to say you’re sure he isn’t.” The atheist might respond “The target is full of all of these zillions of hypotheses – Jesus is God, Allah is God, Ahura Mazda is God, Vishnu is God, a random guy we’ve never heard of is God. You are taking a tiny tiny submillimeter-sized fraction of a huge blue target, painting it red, and saying that because there are two regions of the target, a blue region and a red region, you have equal chance of hitting either.” Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this “privileging the hypothesis”. [0] > There’s a tougher case. Suppose the Christian says “Okay, I’m not sure about Jesus. But either there is a Hell, or there isn’t. Fifty fifty. Right?” > I think the argument against this is that there are way more ways for there not to be Hell than there are for there to be Hell. If you take a bunch of atoms and shake them up, they usually end up as not-Hell, in much the same way as the creationists’ fabled tornado-going-through-a-junkyard usually ends up as not-a-Boeing-747. For there to be Hell you have to have some kind of mechanism for judging good vs. evil – which is a small part of the space of all mechanisms, let alone the space of all things – some mechanism for diverting the souls of the evil to a specific place, which same, some mechanism for punishing them – again same – et cetera. Most universes won’t have Hell unless you go through a lot of work to put one there. Therefore, Hell existing is only a very tiny part of the target. Making this argument correctly would require an in-depth explanation of formalizations of Occam’s Razor, which is outside the scope of this essay but which you can find on the LW Sequences. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privilegin...