blowfish posted:

Short answer:


Long answer:

Missing option five: beliefs are inherently true or false, and do any of the above anyway.


Apparently Paul lives in an area where it is very unusual to ever see tigers and has never talked to other people about tigers. If these things weren't true, he would have either seen a tiger eat people or heard about tigers eating people. He may also know that large animals that eat other animals can eat people, and inferred from knowledge that tigers eat other animals that they could eat him. The probability of him correctly believing that a tiger could eat him is greater than a naive "p=1/(number of things a tiger could do)".

Additional case: Beliefs are inherently true or false, and can lead to adaptive behaviour. There are cases where beliefs that are true are more likely to lead to adaptive behaviour due to a higher chance of correctly evaluating and predicting your environment.(Conversely, there may be other cases where beliefs do not need to be true to be sufficiently adaptive).


And here you are doing trivial maths, which does not offer additional information unless the reader is unaware of high school level probability. Protip: exercises in trivial maths are not good arguments unless you refer to a specific number later in your argument, or compare your trivial maths argument to empirical data.

Alternative: you are full of poo poo and too dumb to notice it.

Snakes are often poisonous venomous (of course you fail to correctly make this distinction). Animals that come into contact with snakes are selected not to get bitten by them, unless immune to the venom. People evolved from such animals. People can also talk and compare other instances of "animal sticks tiny bit of itself into you, you get sick and may die", realise they are similar, and invent the word "venomous" for that. People also incorrectly believe that non-venomous snakes are venomous (putting lots of effort into distinguishing non-venomous snakes from venomous ones is most likely not adaptive unless you specifically eat non-venomous snakes - a belief that is sufficiently close to being true is more likely to be adaptive due to the tradeoff between avoiding snakebites and not wasting time on identifying snake species, which is why batesian mimicry in animals is a thing), and that sepsis from a rat bite is the same as a venomous bite (unless you have relatively sophisticated medicine, there is no adaptive value in distinguishing these completely different mechanisms of making you sick).

I like beer. Beer tastes best when cool. As a result, I regularly buy beer and put it in my fridge. Right now, there is probably some in my fridge. My buddy Steve also likes beer, so there is probably some in his fridge. ~My Girlfriend~ is weird and doesn't like beer, so there normally isn't beer in her fridge. The people I'm visiting are weird like my girlfriend so their fridge probably doesn't have beer in it.

You have completely failed to provide any example of beliefs that do not come from observation and communication with others who have observed, and thus your argument that beliefs being true with higher probability than would be expected from something that evolved and grew up in a vacuum has no substance.

I'm bad at reasoning so goddidit.
An understatement if there ever was one.


As pointed out above, beliefs from sense experiences do not need to be true, just sufficiently true. Finding the proportion of true beliefs to be between "omniscient" and "effectronica naive probability expectation" is therefore expected.

Anything that affects us can be perceived at least indirectly, because at a minimum the occurence of its effects can be perceived. The existence of something supernatural that does not interact with us cannot be ruled out, but is not relevant to our understanding of the world because it is by its very nature the subject of nothing beyond wild-rear end guesses.

not emptyquoting